FLEETWOOD MAC - TUSK (1979) / TUSK (DELUXE) (2015)

So last month I posted what I felt were the best albums of last year, and if you read the post, you'll see that it wasn't so much 'the best of the year in music,' but rather a 'here's what my favorite bands did this year,' because I'm kinda out of touch and lame. So lame, in fact, that I actually thought the best album released last year was a reissue of a 36-year-old record.

I am, however, not quite lame enough to actually stick that on the top of the list. I remember when the album of the year on my local radio station was the reissue of Exile On Main St. (in fact, I think Rolling Stone magazine happened to concur with them on that, if memory serves) and boy, did I think that was lame as all get-out, so I decided not to repeat that mistake, or at least make a halfway decent attempt to cover up how lame I am... or at the very least appear slightly cooler than Rolling Stone magazine, because damn, if you're as lame as they are, you might as well just kill yourself and get it over with.

In all fairness, I don't really feel anyone needs an excuse to talk about Tusk. It is, simply put, one of the greatest pop/rock records ever made, flawlessly merging the seamless pop machine Fleetwood Mac had already become with the grander, bolder and grittier side the band had long flirted with. It's been criticized for its overindulgence and pomp, but there's hardly a song on its twenty-strong tracklist that doesn't serve a purpose in the record's overall structure. Even the weaker numbers (Honey Hi, Angel, Save Me A Place) not only provide a respite from the intensity and darkness of the stronger songs, but also fill in the picture a bit better, offering more glimpses into the culminated sonic world crafted by the album's grand architect: the quietly obsessed guitar god that is Lindsey Buckingham.

Indeed, it's Buckingham's songs that form the bulk of both the album's runtime and the edge of its sonic experimentation, nine songs of aggressively minimal folk rock, as sharp and pointed and no-punches-pulled as the razor-thin desperation in the gifted Californian's voice. And when it came time to flesh out his fellow songwriters' work, the sugary-sweet Christine McVie and the wistfully whimsical Stevie Nicks, he more than rose to the challenge, sharing lead vocal duties on the irresistible 70s power-pop of Think About Me and forcefully driving home the dark grandeur of his former girlfriend's hypnotic mantras in Sisters Of The Moon, to name but two examples.

The production on McVie and Nicks's songs is a tad more traditional-minded than the unapologetic experimentation of Buckingham's work, attesting to one of two possibilities: either a benevolent understanding that you can't really follow up an album like Rumours with twenty tracks of something that sounds like it was captured on a tape recorder halfway through a vicious cocaine binge (The Ledge, That's Enough For Me), or it further hints at the never-ending ego conflicts and drama that were never far from Fleetwood Mac's surface. There was certainly enough bad blood between Buckingham and Nicks at that point for her to have specifically circumvented his authority when it came to production choices on her contributions.

The rhythm section that has forever formed Fleetwood Mac's backbone is no less excellent, with Mick Fleetwood fully embracing Buckingham's minimalism, paring it down to almost nothing on almost every song, only letting loose on the bizarre sales-killer of a single that is the album's title track. John McVie, meanwhile, keeps flawless step with his bang-on-the-money slides and hooks, filling the essential space underneath Buckingham and Nicks's cocaine-covered snarls and hisses and Chris McVie's airy frolicking. They really were the consummately perfect band, completely rounding out and complementing each other's strengths and weaknesses... until Tusk, of course, did away with that.

They never really reached Tusk's level again. The dejection following Tusk's disappointing sales and reception took physical form on the monstrous marathon that was the Tusk tour: two years of hardcore drug use and hedonistic excess as the members' sometimes vitriolic dislike of one another resulted in fight after fight after fight. By the time they hit the studio again in 1982 to make the dead-eyed Mirage, the fire had pretty much gone out of them completely. There were flashes of brilliance, sure, especially from Buckingham on the pointed Can't Go Back, Book Of Love and the utterly superb Eyes Of The World, but all of them sound like Tusk outtakes, frankly, while McVie and Nicks continued to hone their pop craftsmanship to perfection on Love In Store and Gypsy, respectively.

1987's Tango In The Night proved to the band's undoing in all but name, with a reluctant Buckingham and a tireless Chris McVie somehow conjuring up a darkly lavish pop album while the rest of the band drank and drugged themselves into oblivion. Buckingham was out of the band before the Tango tour even left the gate, and while there have been glimpses of substance in the 27 years since, the Fleetwood Mac everyone knew and loved pretty much ended with Buckingham's departure. As if to further drive home how badly the band needs him, his return for 1997's shameless nostalgia-fest The Dance, 2003's pretty-darn-good Say You Will and 2013's surprisingly excellent Extended Play EP have all been far, far more satisfying than 1990's laughable Behind The Mask and 1995's utterly hopeless Time.

So for better or for worse, Tusk was the band's real triumph, and it seems they gradually came to understand that, as last December's lavish 5-CD, 2-LP and DVD package is about the most loving and definitive treatment a record could ever hope to get. They realized where it was they peaked, and finally, finally gave Tusk the in-depth look it so richly deserved... or maybe they just gave up trying to milk more money out of Rumours and turned their attention to another record.

Whichever the case may be, the final results are undeniable. The CDs are, naturally, the real treat here. The first disc is only a qualified success: a brand-new digital remaster of the original album. The crisp sterility of digital media seemed to demand a master that sounded better, or at the very least clearer, than the original, but as I said, it's somewhat troubled; an album that's already as obsessively perfectionist as Tusk can only be improved upon so much, and the crystal clarity of the new master often renders the smooth blend of the album's carefully complementary instrumentation moot, as the instruments all seem to drift out of touch with each other. Nevertheless, hidden gems often emerge out of the murk, such as the gorgeously harmonized backing vocals on Storms, and the playfully panned drum overdubs on Walk A Thin Line take on a new life.

More important than any specific accomplishment, however, is the overall effect of the remaster: it delivers final, unquestionable proof that Tusk sounds as great in today's sterile, digital age as it did on reel-to-reel. If it really had been released in 2015, it would easily have rivaled anything put out that same year in terms of accessibility, experimentation and songcraft. All you really need to do is replace Chris McVie's old Moog with a shiny new Korg, slap some digital effects on the vocals and the drums here and there, and presto: Tusk could be the best album Tame Impala never made.

Holy fucking shit, do I sound old for a 29-year-old sometimes.

Anyway. Discs 4 & 5 are live recordings from the grueling Tusk tour, offering better takes and audio quality than the 1980 Live album ever did. It especially excels in capturing the angst and desperation of The Chain, which can only have darkened over time as the relationships in the band deteriorated. For the most part however, it contributes little of real value, other than perhaps further underscoring how utterly exhausting that tour must have been. Rumor has it that in order to recoup Tusk's losses, Warner made sure that every single set on the whole tour was recorded, so we could theoretically be getting unheard recordings from the Tusk tour until the heat-death of the universe.

But it is on Discs 2 & 3 are where the reissue really shines. Disc 2 takes the exhaustive approach, rifling through the vaults for what seems like damn near every take of every song on Tusk, some of them featuring more heavily than others; pretty much the entire second half of the disc consists exclusively of alternate takes of I Know I'm Not Wrong and Tusk. Disc 3 is the more literal one; titled "The Alternate Tusk," it employs carefully curated alternate takes to recreate the album track-for-track (which I personally feel was a somewhat unfortunate decision, seeing as how one of Tusk's weaker elements is its completely out-of-whack sequencing; a new and reconsidered tracklist would have been more than welcome, either on Disc 1 or 3). The versions fluctuate between being interesting and possibly superior to their original placeholders (Not That Funny's guitar effects give it a juicy, synthlike luster), to unacceptably paltry and justifiably scrapped early stabs at songs; Sara seems especially sub-par, with its jarringly crisp off-beat piano and backing vocals, ridiculous eight-minute runtime and unintentionally hilarious spoken dialogue at its outset ("I wanna be a star! I don't wanna be a cleaning lady!").

It's important to remember that for all his faults and tyrannical reputation, Buckingham's ego had nothing on Nicks's, and judging by how terrible Sara would have been had Nicks been allowed to have her way with it, maybe much of the conflict between them stemmed from Buckingham having to reign Nicks in when the Welsh Witch started taking things a bit too far. Their respective solo careers certainly back this up, with Nicks's laissez-faire attitude to making records serving up more than a few unlistenable clunkers, especially when her Klonopin abuse began to really take hold, while Buckingham's mixture of disciple and eccentricity, while far less commercially successful, has given us more resilient work.

Perhaps more than anything, The Alternate Tusk proves that Tusk doesn't really deserve its reputation at being overly indulgent in its experimental tendencies. On the contrary, Tusk is actually remarkably accessible compared to most of the directions rock was taking at the time. It's a tight, methodical record that only employed experimental strategies when it served the music. For evidence of this, one need look no further than The Alternate Tusk, the record Tusk could have been: an all-over-the-place mess that has more in common with modern indie, somehow, which I guess is a kind of testament to the evolution music has undergone since 1979. In a weird way, The Alternate Tusk is just as much of a modern update of Tusk as Disc 1 is; it's the kind of record Tusk would be if it were released today, only in a bad way, rather than a good way. For all its faults, however, The Alternate Tusk, as a companion to Disc 2, is still of great interest to any scholar interested in seeing how Tusk came to be.

Every take is dated, allowing one to hear in fascinating detail exactly how the songs evolved and took shape. Brown Eyes, Over & Over and You'll Never Make Me Cry stay more or less intact throughout its evolution, testament to Chris McVie's if-it-ain't-broke methodology, but judging by the early versions of Honey Hi and Never Forget, McVie might have been far happier if her songs on Tusk had been a sort of awkward drumless free-for-all hippie kindergarten jamboree, which admittedly would have made her weaker numbers stand out a bit more; even Mick Fleetwood's bracing uptempo work can't quite turn her more shapeless kiddie pop numbers into rock songs on the original Tusk, so maybe it would have been better to just leave them in their unformed state rather than force the issue.

Think About Me changes in one significant way: All three vocalists combine their prodigious talents on the final version, whereas Buckingham contributes no clearly discernible vocals on the earlier one. The delivery of the titular hook is slightly stunted on the older take, whereas the album version elongates a crucial syllable, turning the drab "think about me" into the far catchier "think abooooout me," and I have a sneaking suspicion that the change was Buckingham's contribution.

That's Enough For Me apparently began life as more of a folk-country romp until the decision was made to go hardcore bedroom-fi on its ass ("Shit, that's fast," a stunned Chris McVie balks at the tempo in the earlier take). It slows down enough for some decidedly narcotic-sounding experimentation in a later and largely instrumental take; the finished version is a kind of combination of both, possessing both the speed of the earlier take and the drugginess of the later one (or maybe they decided to just redo the later take but using cocaine this time rather than weed and wine).

Save Me A Place similarly started off as a completely acoustic number, with the major difference between the two being that the latter stayed unplugged into its final form. Presumably, this was done to give Tusk some more variety, but I doubt any amount of experimentation could have kept it from becoming one of Tusk's weaker songs, and to make matters worse, it's on the finished album's first side, thoroughly derailing the considerable momentum The Ledge and Think About Me have accumulated ahead of it (see tracklist grievances above).

It is without a doubt Stevie Nicks's songs that see the most logical evolution, with Beautiful Child and Sara being little more than weird, meandering jam sessions at first. No conscious changes are made; the band just tightens as their familiarity with the songs grows, and the inclusion of Nicks's songs seem mostly a formality on Discs 2 & 3; tellingly, an earlier version of Storms is the only previously unreleased take of a Nicks song on Disc 2.

But the early versions prove an important point about Nicks's methodology: how dependent she has always been on the raw emotion in her troubled, torn and cocaine-shattered voice, and true emotion is often the hardest thing to capture in any studio environment. There is nothing inherently wrong with the two early takes of Storms on the Tusk reissue; the Disc 2 version is reminiscent of her earlier hit Landslide, with its bold, reverberating acoustic guitar, gentle organ and ramshackle, barely-there percussion (there is no bass guitar). The Disc 3 version is even simpler, with nothing but Nicks's breathy croon and Buckingham's steady fingers methodically plucking out the arpeggios.

Neither one of them is technically inferior to the final version heard on the album, and either one could easily have replaced the familiar version, were it not for the fact the take on the album has one of the most gut-wrenchingly sad and powerful vocal performances ever captured on tape, and it is truly irreplaceable, possibly the finest moment in Stevie Nicks's career. The resignation, loss and sadness in her voice just aren't the sort of thing you can produce; you just have to wait for it to appear and hope someone remembered to hit 'record.'

When one listens to them all in sequence, it becomes immediately clear why there are so many fucking versions of I Know I'm Not Wrong on Disc 2: the song went through a long series of tweaks and tests before Buckingham arrived at the finished version: an in-studio creation if there ever was one. Lyrics slowly take shape while Mick Fleetwood's drum work goes through several stages of complexity in a distinctly non-linear evolution. The song's central keyboard hook bafflingly disappears in some of its intermediate incarnations, and the Disc 3 version is a Buckingham/Nicks duet rather than a Buckingham solo lead. The process seems frustrating, torturous, even, as Buckingham agonizes on the record clearly intended to be his masterpiece.

Meanwhile, the multiple iterations of the title track reveal what we all already knew about it: that it was always just a weird, pointless jam song, and although listening to all those different versions back-to-back can be a trippy, mantra-like experience, its earlier versions are just as impenetrable and cheap, if a little more daring. Which is all perfectly fine, provided you don't factor in the story of its recording and promotion.

The entire history of that song just makes no fucking sense to me, any which way you look at it. A rambling blues groove, unadorned by any kind of hook, that is then given certifiably insane premium treatment when Buckingham and Fleetwood spontaneously decide that they need to record the entire USC Marching Band performing it with them in Dodger fucking Stadium. The results are barely audible in the final mix, completely negating the ridiculous expense they went to in recording it. Again, this is by no means a serious problem; lots of bands have blown money on experiments that just didn't work, but then, on top of everything else, it is promoted as the album's lead fucking single, no doubt leaving most of 1979 America with the impression that the band had completely lost their marbles on drugs (which I suppose is partly true). If Lindsey Buckingham had intended to prove to the world that they were not going to get a sequel to Rumours, then by God, he had done it. I honestly can't think of a better way to kill the album, especially not when there were at least eight other songs better suited to role of lead single than the weirdly alienating Tusk.

In the end, perhaps the story of Tusk the song became in most people's minds the story of Tusk the album: driven to excess by drugs and ego, Fleetwood Mac had made a bloated beast of a record that had cost more money than the economies of most African countries at the time, and maybe it was time we all stopped giving a shit about them and started listening to Blondie or whatever. And meanwhile, anyone who actually went and bought the damn thing will have finally been able to hear what Fleetwood Mac are truly capable of, only to realize that everyone else had stopped caring. It must have been a weird thing to experience.

2015 IN MUSIC

I'm not much of a keeping-up-with-the-trends kind of guy and I never have been, and consequently don't really do these "best of" lists unless forced to. I prefer to think of myself as more of a rock historian, really, and consequently my year's best list is largely composed of what older bands got up to this year. Maybe when a few years have gone by and I've done a little more digging around and listening, my Best Of 2015 list will look very very different, but here's how I feel on this very last day of 2015.

Let's just begin by saying that Robert Pollard had a pretty good year in 2015. Ever since Guided By Voices actually-split-up-for-real-this-time-honest halfway through their 2014 tour, the 58-year-old has been taking it easy, by which I mean he's released six full-length albums under four different names and presided over the release of GBV's fourth "Suitcase" compilation, "Captain Kangaroo Won The War." It's a hundred tracks strong of unreleased GBV and GBV-related rarities, and has some real choice cuts, including Hallway Of Glass. a fascinating proto-version of GBV's 1994 "hit," The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory.

It wasn't easy to find quality in amidst Pollard's overwhelming quantity this year, however, with Ricked Wicky's "Swimmer To A Liquid Armchair" feeling especially halfhearted, like he'd rather be watching the game or something. Circus Devils were reliably engaging on this year's effort, "Stomping Grounds," their thirteenth album in fourteen years. Plumbing the depths of what would be considered too experimental or frankly bizarre for GBV, they have long since established themselves as a remarkable little band in their own right, enjoyable not just to GBV fans, but to anyone down for a little freeform slow-roast stoner garage weirdness. Without a doubt, "Stomping Grounds" contains the best of Pollard's new material this year, blowing his solo album and three releases with Ricked Wicky clean out of the water.

Electric Six definitely take home the prize for best album title and best Christmas song of the year with 'Big Red Arthur' off their eleventh studio album in twelve years: "Bitch, Don't Let Me Die!"

Electric Six kind of reinvented themselves on 2013's "Mustang" as back-to-basics garage rockers, abandoning the steady ascent into hi-fi that culminated with 2012's drum machine-driven "Heartbeats & Brainwaves," and while it may have been a wise decision, they seem to be having some trouble finding their stride again. The new stuff is heavy-hitting and lyrically potent as ever, but there's hardly more than a handful of real 'hits' on the last three albums. Here's hoping they keep on trucking and reclaim that mojo soon.

Other honorable mentions from this year include Silversun Pickups' deepest foray into smoothed-out radio pop yet, "Better Nature," and "Dark Sky Island," Enya's return from her seven-year hibernation within the crystal coffin that hovers over Ireland's peat bogs, accessible only by rainbows. It's a stripped-down sound (by her standards), and doesn't always work, but when it does, it ranks among her best stuff. "FFS," the long-awaited collaboration between Franz Ferdinand and their heroes Sparks, was frankly disappointing, but now that I know that Franz Ferdinand are huge Sparks fans, I can totally hear it in all their old songs, which is nice. Last year's Panda Bear single, 'Boys Latin,' was expanded upon with this year's full-length, "Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper," with generally satisfactory results, and if it wasn't technically released last year, 'Boys Latin,' with its undulating synths and trademark ping-pong vocal harmonies, might just have been my favorite new song this year.

Modest Mouse failed to deliver this year, in my opinion, with "Strangers To Ourselves" proving once again that the good times are indeed killing Isaac Brock, or at the very least his passion. Even at their peak, Modest Mouse were never really very imaginative songwriters, with the bulk of their appeal resting on Brock's frantic attempts to simultaneously vent and articulate his misery and frustration, and with that mostly gone, all the band can really do is rehash modern rock cliches and sound largely forgettable. The patent silliness of Brock's manic upswings contain the only part of Modest Mouse still blessed with any vigor, as 'Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami, FL, 1996)' succinctly proves.

Ratatat finally fulfilled their contractual obligation to XL Records with a predictable-sounding, if playfully and competently-made fifth album, and it seems all but certain that something's going to have to change in their repertoire soon if they are ever to be more than the sum of their parts again. Jim James's rough year resulted in a My Morning Jacket album lackluster and self-indulgent enough to get itself nominated for a Grammy, and I'm beginning to think they hit their peak on 2008's "Evil Urges."

Now that we're done with the hits-and-misses, I think we can safely shift into countdown mode. Drum roll, please!

5. - ASH - KABLAMMO!

After a short hiatus and some major family trauma gave us frontman Tim Wheeler's devastatingly sad 2014 solo album, "Lost Domain," Ash returned to their full-frontal roots with the explosive "Kablammo!," proving once again that subtlety and nuance are no match for incendiary riffs and merry singalongs... or are they? Frankly, I felt that some of the earnestness and intimacy of "Lost Domain" could have worked wonders for Ash, and rather than save it for the solo stuff, Wheeler could have reinvigorated Ash and let the band's style shift and age with its members. Perhaps the miserly reviews for 1998's "Nu-Clear Sounds," the band's only real foray into serious emotional depth, made Wheeler permanently wary of opening up, or maybe "Kablammo!" is just a continuation of his recovery, laying the past to rest by rocking harder than he's ever rocked before; a kind of musical flucht nach vorn, if you will.

In any case, "Kablammo!" is still a fine and refreshing rock album, especially the surging head rush of opener 'Cocoon' and stalwart chug-chugger 'Let's Ride.' There's always a kind of special untouchable purity to Ash, as if the fact that they rose to fame in their teens has left them frozen in a permanent innocence, and "Kablammo!" is the strongest example of this since their turn-of-the-century commercial heyday.

4. - DICK VALENTINE - HERE COME THE BAGS!

No shortage of exclamation marks in this year's album titles, that's for sure. For four years now, Electric Six frontman Tyler Spencer has let his lyrical ruminations and obsessions run riot on his trifecta of fine solo efforts. The barebones sound gives the lyrics center stage, and I think it's safe to say that he stands a serious chance of out-weirding his idol, Captain Beefheart. Potently dark humor gets the show going on 'Black Sea Brides,' while Spencer's left-leaning political ideas are given hilarious voice on 'Saddam Hussein' ("How much for the skin suit of Saddam Hussein!?"). 'Enough Embarrassment For One Day' and 'The Marching Band That Never Goes Away' continue with deft social satire, while 'List Of Lovers' is yet another twisted tale of modern romance from a man who's already given us countless more, only this time cunningly intermixed with Spencer's ever-pertinent current affairs commentary("Words become weapons / weapons become girls / girls become property of sultans in the Arab world").

While it may musically not amount to much more than a darkly entertaining comedy album (even though 'One-Dimensional Steve' has definite party potential), there's a focused kind of honesty to Spencer's obvious lyrical gift, honed by decades of Detroit shock-rock silliness. Here is a man with a message, and I don't feel it at all detracts from it that Spencer has chosen comedy as a method for its delivery; in fact, it adds to it. It's unclear to me if Spencer considers 'Dick Valentine' to be simply a stage name or a separate persona altogether, but whatever the case may be, he is always a man worth listening to.

3. - JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD - WASTED ON THE DREAM

About the only people on this list roughly my own age, JEFF The Brotherhood had a brief fling with the major-label world this year, and even if they were promptly dropped by Warner before the latter could release "Wasted On The Dream," the results remain pretty darn great. "Wasted On The Dream" is wonderfully catchy pop-rock in all its simple glory, with a fair dose of entertainingly tasteless stoner riffage thrown in for color. The sun-baked hooks and carefree attitude recall 1990s Linklater films, the sensation of being so drunk on the aweXomeness of yourself and life in general that there simply isn't time to feel down about a damn thing. This album should also receive some sort of award for managing to have Ian Anderson contribute to a track without turning it into an unlistenable shitfest.

2. - JOHN CARPENTER - LOST THEMES

Seldom have one man's musical and directorial efforts produced such beautifully confluent results. John Carpenter's soundtracks have always perfectly reflected the mood of his films: ambitious, unconventional and grandiose, but also endearingly cheap and cheesy and rough-hewn. His first filmless soundtrack very much continues in the same vein, and could in fact have been used to score any one of his movies; one cannot help but wonder if Carpenter doesn't write his soundtracks first and his films second, just sort of writing down whatever pops into his head as he's listening to mixes.

Carpenter's soundscapes are as wondrous, dark and exciting as his films, with nameless horror and danger encroaching from all sides, and yet a unique personality is never far from the surface. "Lost Themes" is both idiosyncratic and universal in its appeal, and it's actually kinda weird he's never released an original album before, considering how impossible it is to dislike his whimsy, grandeur and wicked sense of fun.

1. - BUILT TO SPILL - UNTETHERED MOON

Another band returning from hiatus this year were Built To Spill. After following their 1999 magnum opus "Keep It Like A Secret" with three albums of laid-back, unassuming and subtly excellent guitar reverie that nonetheless failed to produce anything quite as arresting as what came before, the band slowly faded from public consciousness, only to return quite suddenly with a rip-roaring new record that aims for somewhere halfway between KILAS's methodical tightness and the later albums' laconic soundscaping.

Although it is unfortunately marred by the lazy and uninspired "2015 sound," which seems to basically consist of recording the band playing the songs and leaving the mix as-is before redlining the master (see also: this year's Modest Mouse album and this year's Ash album; all three sound exactly the same), "Untethered Moon" draws immense strength from its excellent lyrics, documenting as they do the ever-fractured psyche of frontman Doug Martsch as he muses about the past, transience and the nature of truth ("I can't explain anything to anyone / don't believe that nothing isn't true"), and perhaps finds relief in the discovery that his never-ending search for wholeness and understanding is in itself a cure for what ails him. There is no secret trick to feeling better for the rest of your life, but knowing that fact is, paradoxically, the closest thing there is to such a trick ("I don't know how to never fall apart / no matter how you ever fall apart").

Blanketing all of this lyrical excellence is layer upon layer of fuzzy guitar that always manages to sound just as frustrated, resigned and glum as Martsch's own voice, which has lost none of its bite over the years. Fresh faces in the rhythm section give the songs a certain urgency not heard since 1994's "There's Nothing Wrong With Love," and while this is not necessarily a welcome regression, it certainly gives the album a new feel, quite distinct from its predecessors.

And yet, the album's greatest strength might be that it is so distinctly a Built To Spill album, rich in emotional complexity and yet blessed with an accessible everyday simplicity that their contemporaries have never quite managed to emulate. It is abrasive, welcoming, unrelenting, passive, forthcoming and opaque, somehow all at the same time, and an immensely rewarding listen, offering up new morsels on every revisit. It is everything a Built To Spill album should be.

FRANK ZAPPA - ZOOT ALLURES (1976)

For this week's post, I picked one of my favorite Zappa records and used it to try to exhaustively answer a much-pondered question: "I want to check out Frank Zappa, but I don't know where to begin. Where do I start?"

When I first decided to get into Frank Zappa, I took the logical approach and started at the beginning. Rather fittingly, however, the 'logical approach' didn't really work with Zappa: I found Freak Out! (1966) to be too rambling, psychedelic and, well, freaky for my taste, and not really fitting with the Zappa that I'd heard and been curious about(the raunchy, bluesy boogie of Chunga's Revenge (1970) and the carefree rambunctiousness of Fillmore East (1971)). My teenage self didn't really have the attention span for the mammoth undertaking of going through Zappa chronologically, anyway (the man put out sixty-two albums over a twenty-seven year career - two point three albums a year, on average - and that's not counting the posthumous compilations), so I dropped the idea and moved on to more accessible pastures.

About a year and a half ago, I decided to give Zappa another try, but this time I was going to jump in the deep end: I downloaded all of it. Even after deleting all the double tracks I had due to compilations and reissues, it was 767 tracks spread over fifty-one albums. It's taken me twenty months to fully come to grips with the man's near-psychotic compulsion to spew out records, and I often feel like I'll never truly understand most of it. A lot of it is impenetrably dense ('69's Uncle Meat, '71's 200 Motels, '94's Civilization Phaze III), and many of the releases feel too colored by Zappa's arrogance and self-righteousness to lend themselves to favorable judgement ('81's You Are What You Is, '83's The Man From Utopia, '84's Thing-Fish, '85's Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention).

So where should one start? What is the approachable gateway drug you need to slingshot yourself into the hard stuff? There aren't too many examples of Zappa just being Zappa; an impossibly gifted arranger and musical scientist who pushed rock to the limits of its genre. It's not an easy search, but some examples come to mind.

1969's Hot Rats is the earliest candidate for a Zappa primer. Created during the heights of Zappa's Beefheart years, it features the affable psychedelic bluesman on lead vocals in Willie The Pimp, and the A-side opener is Peaches En Regalia, a true Zappa classic full of his trademark labyrinthine melodies, idiosyncratic arrangements and surprisingly catchy hooks.

1973's Over-Nite Sensation similarly meshes Zappa's ear for melody with his exuberant instrumentations, and remains one of his most celebrated and best-sold albums. It's a free-flowing, lighthearted romp through swagger-heavy organ riffs, titanic guitar solos and showcases Zappa's penchant for exceedingly dirty rhymes, what with all the casual hippie sex, exhibitionism and bestiality.

Joe's Garage (1979) is a particularly rounded indicator of what the man was capable of. It's a rock opera telling a vaguely autobiographical tale about a much-censured and censored musician and his misadventures through the world of traitorous women, devious record executives and lecherous scientologists, all set to a stellar soundtrack of catchy rock, soulful ballads and exquisite guitar work. It may just use traditional rock as a device to signify how typical and harmless the titular musician's work is, but in nonetheless proves to the average man what Zappa self-importantly knew all along: that if he really wanted to, he could probably just have slapped together some cheap rock and roll and shot straight into the big time, but his work ethic demanded he do it the hard way, and maybe prove to everyone how incredibly smart he was in the process (arrogant prick).

Also, despite what I said earlier about You Are What You Is being a tad too preachy and haughty for my tastes, it does have some killer tunes on it, with a surprising amount of them having very radio-friendly production. It's a pop-rock epic with patronizingly silly lyrics about televangelists, Halloween blowjobs and what it's like to be really, really good-looking. Also, if you only listen to one song I've linked to in this blog post, please please please do yourself a favor and listen to this one, because it's utterly hilarious and aweXome.

All that said, as primers, these four albums are all deficient in one way or another, as they all have elements that repel rather than entice. Hot Rats's progressive complexity dissuades the casual listener, while Over-Nite Sensation's overly psychedelic sensibilities can make it sound very dated. While this is, to some, not necessarily a bad thing, I find it gives a false impression of what Zappa stood for. He always strove to have a deeper, more cynical take on composition and subject matter than his contemporaries, and I feel Over-Nite Sensation undersells his creative scope; it (and a host of his other albums, including '74's Apostrophe and '79's Sheik Yerbouti) is what Rolling Stone once disparagingly referred to as "well-orchestrated joke music." Not that there's anything wrong with "joke music," in my book, but I just don't feel like Over-Nite Sensation is all that "well-orchestrated," really. Don't get me wrong, it's nice how loose and improvised-sounding it is, but it just doesn't convey that tightness that makes some of Zappa's strongest work so unique.

The same could be said for 1981's trifecta of instrumental works, Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar, Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar Some More and Return Of The Son Of Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar, as well as 1988's Guitar. While it's very nice to sit and listen to an insanely talented guitarist do live improv for four hundred fucking hours, there are plenty of people who could do that, and once again, it doesn't really give you the full range of the man's talents.

As for Joe's Garage and You Are What You Is, their sarcastic tone and surface veneer of frivolousness do not make them terribly inviting, and You Are What You Is contains hints of the Zappa to come: 80s Zappa is incredibly soulless and mechanical, which is great if you're into that kind of thing (see '84's Them Or Us and '86's Jazz From Hell), but only of interest to the truly committed. No: the best way into Zappa is Zoot Allures.

It's an inconspicuous record, tucked between the unbridled enthusiasm of the early 70s stuff and the colder, more scientific experimentation that came next, resulting in a neatly balanced mixture of both. The production is kept from getting too ambitious, giving each track a clarity and minimalism seldom heard from Zappa, and the compositions are mostly blues-based, catchy and accessible. His rollicking silly side gets to shine, as well as his nuanced perfectionism and knack for atmosphere, sometimes even on the same track.

Also, because of the relatively simple orchestration, every track on the album functioned well as a live number, as evidenced by their frequent appearances on set lists and live albums. Black Napkins, especially, became a fixture of Zappa's live sets for the rest of his career, and understandably so; Zappa deftly solos one of his patented "sound sculptures" around a slick chord progression so smooth it fairly drips cool. It's Zappa at his relaxed, assured best: no politics, no message and no overdoing it. The Bozzio/Estrada rhythm section was at its seamless best, while the rest of the band does almost nothing, tasteful minimalism personified.

Zoot Allures also contains one of my all-time favorite Zappa songs: The Torture Never Stops, a nine-minute-plus canvas of murky atmospherics and moody theatricality. A woman screams in pain/pleasure as Zappa's lyrics describe a grim dungeon lit only by "the light of the iron sausage" (the jokes are never far off).

Zoot Allures's crisp production, straightforward instrumentation and tendency to stick to basics as far as genre is concerned also have a wonderful side effect: they ensured the record would age remarkably well. More than any other Zappa release, Zoot Allures sounds like it could have been released yesterday. The quality of the recording is nothing short of amazing for its time, with Zappa's sleasily whispered vocals on Find Her Finer sounding like he's right there in the room with you (which is kind of creepy, actually).

Those vocals are typical of the veneer of pornographic sleaze that permeates Zoot Allures, and indeed much of Zappa's work, so the album is a gateway to his work not only musically, but thematically as well. Ms. Pinky describes a masturbation aid of some sort, while Find Her Finer offers some helpful pointers on picking up women. Wind Up Workin' In A Gas Station, Wonderful Wino and Disco Boy may not be quite as amorous lyrically, but even Zappa couldn't be fixing to bone someone (or something) on every song. Rather, they convey Zappa's snide social commentary in the more jovial tone that better suited them, as opposed to the bitter hatred that infused records like You Are What You Is and The Man From Utopia.

Altogether, Zoot Allures exudes a cool minimalism and decisive sense of purpose that makes it not only an ideal introduction to Zappa's catalogue, but an excellent stand-alone record; in a weird way, it sounds more like Zappa than Zappa ever did. Paradoxically, it's so typically Zappa that it stands out to the point of being atypical, so even if you don't like most of his work, you might end up liking Zoot Allures.

Personally, though, I am fascinated by the man's seemingly endless catalogue of diverse work. He wasn't always great (in fact, sometimes he downright sucked), but to me, the shitty stuff just makes the good stuff more interesting, and vice-versa. His preference of quantity over quality leaves more for dissection and analysis, and one cannot help but feel he wanted it that way.

Zoot Allures may not have been Zappa at his most forward-thinking or experimental, but I feel it was among the places where he most efficiently used the results of his experiments to create something more fit for public consumption. Granted, such crowd-pleasing wasn't exactly what Zappa was all about, and in fact worked explicitly against for much of his career, but what makes Zoot Allures such an impressive accomplishment is how it demonstrates Zappa's abilities to craft even his far-reaching and often impenetrably nonsensical composition into an album that the casual listener can enjoy, yet still retains that unique Zappa flavor.

Perhaps it stands as testament to something Zappa could have given us, but didn't. Perhaps it's proof that he really could have been monumentally huge, given us a body of music that, rather than be fodder for speculation, could still be selling truckloads of copies the world over. In the end, he chose to be inaccessible and uncompromising, rather than give us what we really wanted. Awful jackass.

SWANS - SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND (1996)

Soundtracks For The Blind is like a post-apocalyptic wasteland of an album. There may still be islands and isolated pockets of civilization, but for the most part, humanity (or music) as we know it is gone, baby, gone. Outside of those few understandable, classifiable outposts of humanity, what are we left with? Desolate, bleak and opaque emptinesses of unforgiving noise. Soundtracks For The Blind was Swans' send-off to the rest of the world, a last, screaming, poignant message before disappearing into their side projects.

Because that's all Swans are now: a side project, just as unworthy of the name as any of the 'Swans related projects' the troubled couple at the band's center have participated in over the years. Where they once reigned supreme as kings of noise, perennially eluding classification as they plumbed the depths of what music could be, they are now nothing but a faint post-rock echo of their former selves, robotically masturbating away in an uninteresting and unrewarding corner of the magnificent sexual arcade they exposed our ears to during their original run.

And it was one hell of a fucking run. Bursting like a slimy, unwelcome mushroom from the fertile soil of the early 80s New York noise scene, they began as a brutal, unrelenting auditory assault, with vocalist/guitarist/whatever-the-hell-it-takesist Michael Gira, the band's only permanent member, acting as commandant. The inhuman industrial harshness of Filth ('83), Cop ('84) and Young God ('84) relented somewhat with the addition of Jarboe on keyboards and backing vocals in 1985, resulting in the deft and somewhat digitized - but no less horrifying - Greed ('85) and Holy Money ('86).

In 1987, they made what many consider their greatest work: the glam-tinged goth excess that is Children Of God. It's a staggering record, over an hour of glorious theatricality that defies easy categorization, or indeed description. It hypnotizes as it anesthetizes, like binge-drinking your way through a satanic seance.

What followed was no less great, but a tad more subtle. Gira and Jarboe experimented away from the band as The World Of Skin, resulting in three fantastic albums, the first two earthy and vague and the third positively chipper in comparison, flirting as it does with acoustic folk-pop sensibilities and far gentler strokes than the couple were known for. Swans kept functioning contemporaneously, evolving in similarly radio-friendly ways with The Burning World ('89), White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity ('91) and Love Of Life ('92). They had the closest thing they ever would to commercial success when their cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart became a minor hit in 1988. The cover itself is forgettable, but it gave Gira a tantalizing glimpse of the mainstream recognition that he never seemed to forgive the world for denying him. This, perhaps, tinged his later work with even more pessimism and bleakness, including that of the album I'm ostensibly trying to write about here.

Come the mid-nineties, Swans had become an iron warhorse of a band, having gone through multiple lineups and redefinitions of their sound, and released the distinctly post-rocky The Great Annihilator in 1995. At the time, it must have seemed like that album was sealing their ultimate fate: noise pioneers turned alt-rock outsiders, a band that lived a very human lifetime in only thirteen years. They had been angry, squealing infants, opinionated and melodramatic youths, thoughtful adults and finally, bitter, withered seniors. When Gira announced that the next album would be their last, fans could not have expected more than a final whimper before his troops finally marched into the great unknown.

They could not have been more wrong. Soundtracks For The Blind is a two-and-a-half-hour explosion of exquisitely carved ambient soundscaping, punctuated by bursts of brutal post-rock at its murderous best and further audio experimentation that, at its best, melds the ambience with the rock, and even at its worst, provides wondrous twists and turns to the deranged odyssey that is listening to this album.

Seriously, this record is like a surreal auditory labyrinth. Both discs (it's a double album - naturally) open with vaguely parallel introductory hymns, with the Silver CD (the discs are not numbered - that would be too easy) opting for an entirely instrumental, synth-based gate into the maze, while the Copper CD samples Jarboe at her creepily childlike best before the lead-in to the synth line. She sounds for all the world like a disembodied voice wafting down from the attic as she babbles nonsensically about "the filthy premise of your terrible innocence," before the ambience envelops you.

Both CDs also feature lengthy post-rock epics early on their tracklists, with the Copper CD jumping straight to the primal major-chord euphoria of The Sound, while the Silver CD takes a lengthy detour into the blind emptiness of I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull before the repenting confessions of Helpless Child take over. I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull also gives us the first taste of what is easily Soundtracks For The Blind's most disturbing element: the samples.

The Silver CD's samples seem largely preoccupied with health and death, with the uncomfortably awkward rant of I Was A Prisoner In Your Skull giving us a glimpse into the mind of a man so determined to tell us how "fucked up" a nameless third party is that he himself seems to rank fairly low on the sanity scale after a good three minutes, and a pair of senior citizens describe their woes in How They Suffer. A child chants blissfully on The Beautiful Days, unaware of the dank sickness welling up behind her.

The Copper CD speaks more to femininity and the exploitation thereof, with a befuddled father detailing his concerns for a teenage daughter in Her Mouth Is Filled With Honey, while Minus Something features a phone sex worker who sounds at the end of her rope. Where the hell did Swans get all these samples, anyway? I can't seriously imagine a source for any of these that didn't involve some particularly soul-destroying research.

The themes of the samples vaguely reflect the discs themselves. The Silver CD is all physicality and body horror, like it's a soundtrack to a David Lynch film written by H.P. Lovecraft. Live Through Me's earnest tingling and innocence preclude the ruthless battering of Jarboe's Yum-Yab Killers, one of several live recordings that were plundered from Swans' no-doubt massive library. All Lined Up's soulless twisting of a track from Gira's '95 solo album, Drainland, is a dichotomy of muttered vocals and massive, gothic refrains. Samples and loops take on lives of their own on Surrogate 2 and the aforementioned How They Suffer before the proceedings are brought to a surreal close with Animus, another post-rock live recording, this one fraught with a queer sense of self-righteous unwholesomeness that keeps you guessing until the whole thing disappears into drone insanity.

It is worth noting that while the original and seemingly unaltered versions of many of the live tracks had appeared before, on other records (Die Tür Ist Zu, Swans Are Dead), Soundtracks For The Blind offers definitive editions of those songs, fully realized and merged with the rest of the album to create its patchwork quilt of noise. It wouldn't do to try to pass off a bunch of lengthy post-rock buildups as an album without giving them some kind of sheen and eloquence... oh wait, that's kind of what the post-reunion Swans albums sound like.

The Copper CD is looser, dreamier and less defined, but no less excellent. It's above-noted femininity is underscored by having Jarboe appear more frequently than on the other CD. A very early Swans number, Your Property, is given new dimensions of disgust by Jarboe, as well as more studied and mature instrumentation by the ever-diligent backing band. The Sound's lyrics are a pleading prayer to the protagonist's mother, while the absolutely blood-curdlingly terrifying Hypogirl proves that Swans could be just as effective without samples and technological trickery; Jarboe on her own can scare the wits out of you. Fan's Lament and Blood Section offer yet more elements to Soundtracks with their straightforwardness, while Secret Friends yields more gentle touches.

As disparate as the elements composing the album are, none of them ever feel out of place or unnecessary; all the tracks contribute to a whole that does not need to be understood in any literal sense, because it can be felt. Soundtracks For The Blind is the perfect name for it, really, as it doesn't tell a story so much as it fills out some weighty, intangible object, something earthy and glistening and disgusting and endlessly fascinating.

Never before I heard it and never since have I felt so much like I could truly disappear into an album. It's so carefully constructed and yet it seems so effortless and instinctive; Swans made it look easy to be as divergent and unique as they were, while all along keeping me in awe of them. Soundtracks For The Blind, to me, is music in its purest form, primal and unadulterated... or perhaps 'unadulterated' is the wrong word, because it was their indulgence in adulteration, spoilage and corruption that made them so great. By plumbing the depths, they kept themselves above and beyond any other band that has graced my ears to this day, and in keeping with this contradictory nature, they crafted, with Soundtracks For The Blind, a record of perfect music without really 'writing' any songs, in the traditional sense of the word.

Soundtracks For The Blind is music beyond music. It's indescribably powerful sound, intricately cultivated and carved to the shape of your ear and brain over a career of brilliant experimentation that, in retrospect, seems to have existed solely to bring humanity this album. It sounds like everything and nothing that came before it, it has not been equalled since, and even if it ever will be, it will never be forgotten. At least not by me.

BUTTHOLE SURFERS - LOCUST ABORTION TECHNICIAN (1987)

As the champions of knowing idiocy, the Butthole Surfers had to have had some idea they knew what they were doing when they created Locust Abortion Technician, a half-hour or so of scummy post-punk riddled with samples, nonsense and drug-fueled lunacy. They manage to hide it pretty well, though: not a shred of those thirty-four minutes makes any sense whatsoever, and try as hard as you want to decipher it, LAT offers no answers. Many times have descriptions such as "the ultimate drug record," and "just listening to it gets you high" been bandied around, but let me assure you: if it's drug music you're looking for, then look no further.

I've often wondered what it must have been like mixing songs like HAY and Kuntz. Did the band actually sit there in their home studio in Austin, pondering over minor creative decisions in a deep and meaningful way? "Yeah, just turn that loop of Gibby saying 'hey!' over and over again up a little for that last part, then we can fade in that reversed/sped-up drum track. This'll really bring the track to its fullest potential and make the album what it's supposed to be." And when they 'wrote' Kuntz, which is essentially a lengthy sample of a Thai pop song with some typically random delay effects thrown in, was there a deep sociological message they were trying to convey, and if so, what was it? Did the Butthole boys believe that through music, they could demonstrate the fallibility of the construct we refer to as 'language' by showing that without context, words are nothing but meaningless symbols? Or did they just get high and trust their luck? Do they even remember making this record?

They certainly pleaded ignorance when an interviewer allegedly asked them about the recording process for a previous EP, Creamed Corn From The Socket Of Davis. Guitarist Paul Leary said he remembered choosing the cover art, but other than that, none of them could recall the release even existed, never mind details of its recording.

But is that all there is to LAT? A bunch of nihilistic Texas punks high on acid spazzing out in a home studio and seeing what comes out of it? Could a group of drug-addled wastoids fronted by a former accountant really write and record a song that so well captures the ominous certainty of aging and loneliness as 22 Going On 23? Could the musings and ideas of a few artsy, scatology-minded perverts really amount to a song like U.S.S.A., delving as deeply as it does into the frantic hypoxia of Cold War anxieties while at the same time turning them on their head? The answer, of course, is "Yes, they could, and yes, they did."

Because the best part of LAT is its irreverence and balls-out lunacy. Sometimes the only way to really express the heights and depths of speculation and realization to which drugs can take you is to make the form of your expression as random and chaotic as the drugs themselves. Musically speaking, LAT may be bookended by arguably superior albums (1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse and 1988's Hairway To Steven), but neither one of them manages to match the energy, darkness, euphoria and, surprisingly enough, the consistency and coherence of Locoust Abortion Technician. As ambitious as the other two offerings were, their insistence on telling the whole story on every song means that they're not as quick to the punch, and far from being incomplete sketches, LAT's grooves and moods say all that needs to be said; they just do it better, faster and more accessibly.

And it's not like there aren't 'real songs' on Locust Abortion Technician. Human Cannonball is a precursor to the more focused work found on Hairway To Steven and later releases, featuring clearly sung vocals, complete with catchy lyrics and vocal hooks, over a fairly traditional chord progression, and The O-Men, bizarre and terrifying as it is, is actually a neat little barrage of genre-bending noise rock that satisfies well with its simplicity.

The latter song also emphasizes part of what makes LAT rise above the Surfers' guitar-driven post-punk contemporaries: how clear it sounds. It seems that in the midst of their drug bingeing, Leary, Haynes and the other Buttholes actually did some exemplary EQ and level work; every instrument can be heard with crystal clarity, every acid-drenched guitar overdub and battered floor tom is as audible as Gibby Haynes's frantic hollering and pleading, with none of the weird distance and treble-heavy muddiness that plagued the other important records of LAT's time and genre, such as Big Black's Songs About Fucking, Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and Swans' Children Of God. It's no surprise, really, that Leary went on to record songs for Sublime, U2 and Daniel Johnston and others: the man has a gift for production, and LAT offers the first real glimpses of that gift.

A full fifth of Locust Abortion Technician is the smoked-up Sabbath riffage of Sweat Loaf, which is inconveniently placed at the start of the album, as if the Surfers were trying their damndest to ensure no one would have the patience or interest to listen to the whole thing... or maybe it's a warning? The horrifying scorn and drudgery of what follows is as hypnotic as it is off-putting. Pittsburgh To Lebanon and Weber ask dark and delicious questions of the listener, before providing their own answer, which is, as it always is with Locust Abortion Technician, drugs, drugs and more drugs. Drugs ask the questions and drugs provide the answers. In case I haven't stated it clearly enough, this is an album made by and for people who do drugs, enjoy doing drugs and are on drugs right now.

Aside from the aforementioned Kuntz, there is more cryptic humor scattered throughout, including the famously nonsensical punchline to the record's opening joke, and the fact that there are two separate and subtly different tracks on it called Graveyard, with, once again, no concrete explanation offered. It could be said that the Surfers' ever-superior take on psychedelia owes much to their refusal to take themselves seriously. While other drug bands scuttle about frantically, trying to tell deep truths about their trips and how their doors of perception were like, opened so wide, man, the Buttholes always seemed to secretly know that it was all completely meaningless, and the strength and surprising beauty of that knowledge was never more evident than it was on the blisteringly nonsensical Locust Abortion Technician.

ELLIOTT SMITH - ELLIOTT SMITH (1995) and EITHER/OR (1997)

I recently wrote a short piece about Elliott Smith's posthumous release, From A Basement On The Hill, where I claimed that it was my favorite album. I still hold to that, but you have to understand that in spite of its greatness, it is a flawed work, hampered by an inconsistent songwriting quality and uncertainty in its direction. I just like it a lot because it's the most varied and layered of his albums, offering near-endless playability and repeat listening value. Every time I listen to it, I hear something new and great that I hadn't heard before.

But Smith managed to release two albums while he was alive that, rather than take you on any kind of journey, are succinct, direct and to-the-point about what they are: masterpieces, pure and simple. There's not a song wasted on either of them as they firmly establish Smith's legacy as the perfect fusion of eloquent songwriter, unique performer and troubled, awkward loner.

Elliott Smith and Either/Or track Smith's trajectory as he comes into his own, veering away from the noisy indie ruminations of his band, Heatmiser, in which he shared writing duties with fellow guitarist/singer Neil Gust. On their first two albums, '93's Dead Air and '94's Cop & Speeder, the Gust songs and Smith songs are interchangeable, really, with both men displaying an aptitude for sludgy, guitar-driven punk with little in the way of melody. On 1996's more mellow and melodic Mic City Sons, however, it becomes evident that Gust prefers vague and moody sketches of songs, whereas Smith has taken to crafting hook-heavy pop songs that have a far more human face on them, said face being Smith's own.

His intriguing strength of character is the instrument he really perfected more than any other over the shared trilogy of albums he made between '95 and '97. While Mic City Sons is an excellent album in its own right, its main detractor is the odd dichotomy between Smith's subtle and precise strokes as he figures out how to push people's buttons with his voice and Gust's brute-force methodology as he powers through his songs on charisma alone, largely forgoing any attempts at style and finesse. On the solo albums that blanket Mic City Sons on either side, one can witness Smith blooming without the distractions (On a side note, I just want to say that although this paragraph makes it sound like Neil Gust is a stupid dick who can't write any good songs, that's not how I feel at all. Heatmiser wouldn't have been the same without him, and he was as important to the band as Smith was.)

There is a hint of seriousness to Elliott Smith that wasn't there on his '94 solo debut, Roman Candle. Not that Roman Candle isn't dark as all hell, but there is a feeling on Elliott Smith that the stakes have been raised, like he knows people are listening now. It kicks off with what is probably most people's introduction to Smith's music: Needle In The Hay. It's straightforward to the point of recklessness, nothing but a few two- or three-string chords and fiercely whispered phrases, and is an excellent opening track in how it perfectly demonstrates Smith's MO. It's no coincidence that it has become probably his most famous song, but not because it's a particularly good song (it's not, really). Rather, it subsists entirely on Smith's style of playing and singing, showcasing his palette without really painting anything of significance.

Once that's been safely established, he then delivers a series of songs in what would become one of Smith's signature styles: a dreamy, hazy concoction of drawled classical guitar chords linked together with eloquently sloping arrangements that already attest to his budding genius. Clementine's stoned, cocksure gait and blissfully resigned lyrics contrast wonderfully with the indescribable beauty of its delivery. The hook in The White Lady Loves You More's refrains are about as country as Smith would ever get, while the insistent strumming of the verses saunters wonderfully, keeping things from getting too traditional.

There are also detours, tracks that are essentially punk songs performed with an acoustic guitar - namely Christian Brothers, Southern Belle and St. Ides Heaven - that maintain his loud rock sensibilities, and although they accomplish little of what many of Smith's indie and grunge contemporaries could not (there is even a Heatmiser version of Christian Brothers that proves how easily these songs transform into rock anthems), they are nonetheless just as well-crafted as the more pop-oriented songs are. One gets the feeling that the sludge and the dirt were more than just devices to Smith, however: he seems to truly have had a love for just busting out a really loud tune once in a while. It's easy to forget that there was a boisterous, fun-loving side to him, and while the songs' subject matter remains as angst-ridden and difficult as ever, there is definite joy in their performance.

They also help establish a special little mood that persists throughout both Elliott Smith and Either/Or: that of barely restrained power. Smith had a gift for sounding like he was just barely keeping from exploding with anguish whenever he opened his mouth, like all his frustrations were perennially about to cave in on him. This mood complements the albums' lo-fi production well, as to fully let himself go Smith would have need a budget and production value he would only attain once he signed with DreamWorks to release '98's XO and 2000's Figure 8. And of course, once we finally get to see him explode into hi-fi, one can't help but be a little bit disappointed, as if he'd been demystified.

Elliott Smith is, essentially, a troubador's album. Its beauty lies in its simplicity and directness; it wagers everything on the quality of its songwriting and the personality of the performer, and triumphs without question. Either/Or, on the other hand, is a rock album, where Smith has become a frontman rather than solo performer. There's a slight cockiness and swagger to it, like Smith has established beyond a doubt that there are people who love his work, and while that confidence does destroy some of the intimacy that made the first two albums so precious, it allows his songcraft to truly shine, and man oh man, does it ever fucking shine.

The aforementioned restraint is all over Speed Trials, its furiously pattered brush drums ringing out like punctuation to Smith's voice, which has now achieved the silky slide that would stay with him until he died. Just like Elliott Smith's opening track established that album's style, so does Speed Trials break in the listener to how Either/Or will function: an album of songs that hover somewhere between acoustic pop ballads and full-on rock anthems. Ballad Of Big Nothing's refrains are catchier than they have any right to be, and while Pictures Of Me might be fairly cheesy as a song and a bit too Beatles-esque for my tastes, its assurance and boldness are undeniable, and it provides the arrangement blueprint for several of his later organ-driven pop numbers, especially Waltz #2 and Baby Britain.

It also highlights one of the most important things about Smith's music: that he was okay with making very traditional stylistic choices. There is something distinctly silly about the little scale-climbing hooks in Punch And Judy, again attesting to his boisterous side. It is a testament to Smith's skill that he makes those little moments work on such a moody album, rather than have them stand out. He gets a little carried away with this traditionalism on XO and Figure 8, in my opinion, resulting in jaunty, frivolous songs like In The Lost And Found, Son Of Sam and Happiness, which remain some his weakest songs ever. But it still works on Either/Or, kept in check either consciously or as a result of Smith's inexperience with the form.

There are, of course, callbacks to the minimal troubador stylings of the earlier albums on Either/Or, namely on the beautifully dismal depression and hopelessness of Between The Bars, the shy, eerie Angeles, and, most noticeably, the lone shaft of sunlight at the end of the tunnel: Say Yes.

Elliott Smith and Either/Or have both similar beginnings and endings. Say Yes is the answer to The Biggest Lie in the same way that Speed Trials expands and perfects what Needle In The Hay began. However, in the case of the album closers, it is a change for the worse. Say Yes feels clumsy and forced when compared to the heartbreaking little gem that is The Biggest Lie.

The Biggest Lie is simply superior to Say Yes in every single way (except maybe the group vocal harmonies). Where Say Yes is based on carefully rehearsed chords that feel a little too lifted from a Cat Stevens song, The Biggest Lie builds on instinctive plucking. Say Yes's refrain is almost meaningless in its cliché simplicity, and it's somewhat jarring to hear Smith discard his trademark obscurity and metaphor for the pedestrian casualness of Say Yes's lyrics. The Biggest Lie is fairly direct, too, but it keeps the mystery intact by leaving holes in the story. What is "the biggest lie?" There are as many answers as there are Elliott Smith fans, and their answers attest more to their own basic nature and state of mind than they ever could about Smith, who took the answer with him to his grave.

There's also something to the vocal delivery of The Biggest Lie that is nothing short of incredible. I've always felt that the greatest talent a singer can have is to be able to deliver clichéd and oft-repeated lines as if they were gospel, absolute and utter truth, so in a way the singer has to be a good actor, and as James Cagney once said, the trick to acting is to look the other actor in the eye and tell the truth.

So when Elliott Smith sings the line "everything you do makes me wanna die," is it the simple purity and gutsiness of the phrase that puts tears in my eyes every time I hear it, or is it the strength of Smith's performance? Is it so fucking great because he is, as Jimmy Cagney would say, "telling the truth?" I honestly don't know, but I do know that no point of Say Yes even comes close to the raw, bristling emotion of that moment. It's incredible, an exceptionally beautiful moment that stands out even in a body of work full of heartbreaking genius, and it gets me every time.