XO (1998)

XO (1998)

The record — his first for Spielberg’s DreamWorks — comes frontloaded, with the spiderwalking “Sweet Adeline” (a nod to his grandmother’s glee club in the title) and the masterfully picked “Tomorrow Tomorrow” preceding all the full-length, full-band efforts. It was as if, like a magician, he wanted to burn the formula in front of his listeners’ eyes, then reveal the paper, unharmed. The former begins as thin as mountain air, playing coy with a wheedly organ. Halfway through, he lays into a full drumkit and tack piano, sending the titular phrase up like overlapping smoke signals. His careful approach to the melody is abandoned for the abandon of feel. “Tomorrow Tomorrow” is a harbinger of calamity strung on fingerpicked clusters, with Smith at his most lyrically elusive, multi-tracking a glum choir of witnesses. And then it’s on to “Waltz #2 (XO),” perhaps his most beloved late-period tune, assuming everyone streaming “Somebody That I Used to Know” these days is looking for Gotye. Structurally, it’s not his most dynamic composition (the bass is particularly bereft of ideas). Emotionally, it’s a trip to hell, all that blunt chording and strangled leaps into the upper register underlining a portrait of an unappreciated woman, and the son who can’t run far enough. More than anything else in his catalog, perhaps, the act of listening feels intrusive, and yet it became a cornerstone of his setlist. On the Dutch TV program “2 Meter Sessions,” he halted a taped performance of the song. “I’ve just played it hundreds of times and I’m just sick of it,” he insists, his headphones still over his ears. “I just can’t play it; I’m sorry.” During the sitdown, the interviewer presses him on this, and Smith changes his defense. “I had to stop it because… it’s… it just… I mean, what’s the point of playing a song badly?” The segment closed with a piano performance of “Miss Misery.”

The simple shock of Elliott Smith exploring a studio worth a shit was enough to secure this record’s reputation. It is, to be sure, an imposing shambles. He dabbled in baroque grunge-pop (“Amity”), horn-rock (“A Question Mark”) and decadent-Beatle tone poems (“I Didn’t Understand,” “Waltz #1″). With its high-flown solo and string contrails from Jon Brion’s M1 Chamberlin, “Bottle Up and Explode!” stacks up to anything composed by LA’s shaggy songwriting set from a couple decades prior. Compensating for a lack of cohesion, XO bookends its content with pairs: the opening one-two punch, the closing songs about understanding. The subdued tracks gleam with fully confident melodies, and the genre dabbling benefits from total commitment. Wittingly or not, Tom Rothrock harked back to Smith’s proggy teenage days with his au courant drum loop for “Independence Day”; Smith responded with a crushed-out text, climaxing with “everybody knows/ you only live a day/ but it’s brilliant anyway.”