What is his best album?

What is his best album?

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how is that mf always so greasy god.

Anyway, I think Figure 8 was his best. Well-structured, lots of catchy songs and also some interesting songs composition wise (Everything Means Nothing To Me).

All his albums are good t b h
b
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it's almost a tie between self titled and either/or for me. i think either/or takes it though.

The first 3 ones are the more consinstent ones
There are stil gems in his other albums
It always make me sad that this guy was so fucked up all the time, his suicide was really crude.
RIP eliott

The expanded edition or no?

/thread/

Roman Candle by far. Dick deep in heroin, every song transcends his talent.

Here's "Last Call". One of my favourite endings to a song.

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contrarian's answer. i agree with what you said though, it's just the one i don't like so much because it's so upbeat and superficial by comparison.

roman candle and either/or are the albums i love from start to finish. on xo and s/t i love probably half the tracks, figure 8 and basement on the hill it's a select few.

elliott was my biggest inspiration to pick up guitar and try to write my own music so i'll always have a sentimental love for him.

i didnt even know about the expanded. the original is fantastic though. not a bad song on the album really. s/t feels a bit spottier but i do like the lo-fi style on that album a lot better. new moon has a lot of good songs like that.

He didn't do heroin until after figure 8. Right when the tour for that was wrapping up was when he got hooked. What you're hearing is just Portland in the 90s. He wrote about the things he saw, which given Portland in the 90s was a lot of junkies.

>suicide
Not confirmed, btw. Autopsy says as much.

He was just always greasy. There are some funny stories from his friends that he'd walk out of the shower and his hair would be clean and then 20 min later he looked like the OP pic

FOR ME the production started to get a little wacky around figure 8

nothing superficial about it, I think it's an album that really reflected Elliott Smith's true outlook on life, or atleast what he wished he could be like. He sings on "Kings Crossing" about how he felt like the industry was trying to play up his misery and how he was guilty of forcing it into a lot of his songs.

The songs on figure 8 are more to me about not giving up, but still keeping everything in the perspective. L..A. is one of my favourite songs though "last night I was about to throw it all away" seems to slip by a lot of people just because the song is upbeat. For similiar reason "Ballad of Big Nothing" is my favourite song fullstop, the last line is absolutely crushing, it's the only song I've ever cried to. IDK how to explain this well and I don't mean to sound pretentious btw.

not at all, thanks for your reply man.

i guess i'll have to listen to figure 8 again. i'm sure you're right that things have slipped me by. i also agree that upbeat =/= superficial, i just never really understood or could relate to much of figure 8 and i felt like it was more elliott just wanting to write some great, well arranged pop songs. happiness is beautiful though.

Listen to the grand mal tapes of all of his leaked unreleased material. He REALLY plays up the fact that people are trying to pigeonhole him as this sad sack depressed writer and he isn't that way at all. Of course his estate kept a lot of it off the version of basement they put out.

Honestly everyone should just listen to everything he never released, and form your own version of basement on a hill after reading about elliott's ideas. The album would have been far more compelling and was flat out censored and people who knew what elliott's wishes were were kept out of the process. It's absurd.

you dont sound pretentious at all. its hard to not have some kind of emotional reaction to a lot of his stuff.

I always find myself coming back to New Moon; I just love the raw feelings and his tone of frustration in songs like Riot Coming.

OK to phrase this better, figure 8 is to me like what being at the rock bottom place is, things out of your control have gone wrong and you're just really fucked up from it all, and you really want to change it so you start to truly see the happiness in everything or atleast try to, because things are that bad that you can't just go on moping about. You realise that your presence on earth seems to taint everything around you but you actually want it to change.

Reminder this is a man that didn't actually commit suicide, that isn't how he would've wanted to leave behind this earth. I think it's a huge injustice from his fans, knowing how much he cared and how hard he tried to set good examples and not be used just as an "act" to accept that he really commited suicide, when there is so much proof that he didn't, and when he was always such an honest person.

Also, figure 8 does have some pretty cutting lines, you just need to read deeper into it. figure 8 and XO are where elliott's has some of his biggest uses of double entendre

>Reminder this is a man that didn't actually commit suicide, that isn't how he would've wanted to leave behind this earth.
This.

whenever people say he was suicidal or depressed to justify the suicide narrative, I just have to say. "sure, but that doesn't mean he committed suicide" the evidence to the contrary is just far to damning. Would he have eventually if he fell on hard times? maybe, perhaps even probably, but he never got the chance to make that call because he was murdered.

Right on. Thanks for the info

I will, thank you. He is a very honest person, everybody who knows him says that, and I think it's very obvious to see too. I think it's also really sad that people still won't believe everything he said before his death, about him really enjoying a lot of things about life and they sort of assume that all those things he said were a facade, hiding how super "depressed" and "hopeless" he really was. And because he gets looked at this way, it was a lot easier to frame his death as suicide, and to get most of his fans to believe it, because of all the things he said in his music and how they interpret it with this bias now. He's definitely turning in his grave at all this.

Little more info for you. His girlfriend, the one suspected of murder, was also his dealer and the one who introduced him to heroin. Rumor was he was going to split with her now that he was clean and just realized how bad the situation was, hence his song Mr. Goodmorning, which can be found on the grand mal tapes. It was also the last song he worked on (along with Suicide Machine). Suicide machine is explicitly about how the industry has tried to pin him as depressed, "everyone's trying to turn me into a suicide machine." Curious these are the last two songs he worked on before he "killed himself"

The case of his alleged suicide is something that has driven his friends apart as well. some of them believe it, other's strongly suspect either his girlfriend or a third party killed him. At one of the screenings for the recent documentary about him, his photographer and close friend stopped a fan who claimed elliott killed himself and essentially said, "we don't know what happened to elliott on that day, only two people do. one of them is dead and the other refuses to talk." She was also allegedly seen sacking his studio the evening after he died. He died around 1pm. his girlfriend also sued his estate for money because "elliott "planned" to marry her" with no evidence for this claim other then something he allegedly said to her and only her.

on the other side, he also jumped off a cliff.

Was drunk and didn't see the cliff coming up at night.

Erratic behavior nonetheless, I'll admit. Like I said, I think the guy had issues with depression and suicide, I just don't think he killed himself in this instance. I'm not saying he wasn't capable of behaving that way.

Love this dude, my favourite artists.
Either / Or is my favourite album of all time, but really he hasn't got a single bad album. I recommend them all.

he ran off a cliff, thats just more biased interpretation that came after his death. Him and his friends were running in a forest at night (can't remember the reason) and they ran off a cliff, not just Elliott. After his death people heard he jumped off a cliff and from there assumed he was trying to kill himself.

And also there was plenty of other reasons specific to the timeframe before his death that he wouldn't have logically killed himself (he was pouring his soul into making the next album and building his studio).

And the death itself correlates a LOT more with being murdered rather than killing himself. His girlfriend was known to make threats, her fingerprints were actually ON the knife, she pulled it out and that's what really killed him for sure, she had first aid training but apparently she "forgot" the no.1 rule not to pull out a foreign object.

I would hope that if I was killed by my girlfriend and there was that much evidence it was murder, my friends would put a lot more investigation and be a lot more skeptic, especially if my girlfriend was "refusing to talk". It just sounds like they're all too scared/too comfortable.

Either/Or

Forget the rest.

I think if everybody is going to take a guess at how he died and parrot it, they should be saying murder, not suicide, based on how much evidence there is for one versus the other. But actually I think we should just say he died of unknown causes because it's the most true thing and it wont give people reason to keep placing all this bias on the music he made whilst he was still living.

>But actually I think we should just say he died of unknown causes
This generally seems to be the consensus amongst those close to him. I just wish there was more done by his estate to get his unreleased music out there, but they really don't want to seem like they're just trying to profit. Which I understand the hesitancy, but just look at what they've put out from him: a shit load of instrumental throw-aways that he never completed while they let at least 3 albums worth of unreleased material, with at least 1 of those albums being songs no one has heard except his archivist, and this doesn't even touch what dreamworks still has, just collect dust.

what i've learned from this is that rivers cuomo made a song for (and dated) a murderer.

either/or>roman candle>xo=>elliott smith>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>figure 8