Matthew “Slim” Moon, the founder of Kill Rock Stars, was blown out of the water by Roman Candle. As he notes to Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene, he was happy to refer Smith to his preferred destination, K Records. K didn’t register any reaction to Roman Candle, so Elliott began a partnership with KRS. The aesthetic remained — expertly fingerpicked acoustic beds with vérité production — but Smith’s compositional sense was leaps ahead of where it was just a few months prior. He carves out room for solos and bridges. The instrumental touches are inspired: the galloping, doomy figure in “Christian Brothers,” the suspended waltz of “The White Lady Loves You More,” the droning harmonica in “Alphabet Town”. It all adds up to a pungent impotence. The angry-young-drunk persona grows a green new shoot: the lonely chronicler. Last call was now a state of mind.

Around this time, Big Star’s “Thirteen” made its way into his live repertoire. And while, for all his lyrical grappling with addiction, he was never a dissipated presence like Chilton, he shared his knack for wounded wisdom. “The Biggest Lie” slips arresting imagery (“a credit card registered to Smith”) and devastating fake-outs (“dancing on a pot of gold/ flake paint”) next to a solo that slaps a new dimension on the plaintive vocal melody. “Clementine” is as draggy as anything on Third/Sister Lovers, signing off with a po-faced anachronism (“dreadful sorry/ Clementine”) while making room for superfluously wonderful vocal flourishes. “Coming Up Roses” is perhaps his high-water mark to this point, an air-tight song that still let the ghosts through, combining a crackerjack honky-tonk solo (against which he sighs and predicts XO) with wheezing harmonium.

The junkie imagery mounts a furious stand, and while it would never be far from Smith’s pen, he had more to depict. As such, Elliott Smith is a rough document, a portrait of shaky crisis management only barely mitigated by a surefooted melodic sense. There’s a sense of insularity that’s unmatched in his catalog. On Roman Candle, his unsteady footing and the inclusion of an instrumental gave it the cast of unrealized ambition, of a rough draft. Here, he’s got the songs and the presentation; he summons darkness and wraps it around him. At only one point — the multi-tracking accusation that caps “Southern Belle” — does he give the impression of actually addressing someone, rather than turning the churn inward. In the eyes of many, Smith could never top this set. But he did.