A 'fond farewell' to a tragic genius

It's a small consolation that Elliott Smith's posthumous release is not by any means the kind of opportunistic barrel scraping that you see with Tupac Shakur's material. From a Basement on the Hill is the album that Smith was working on at the time of his death last October; rather than take advantage of tragedy, Smith's friends and family helped piece together one last glimpse into the mind of indie rock's tortured junkie prince.\nThough it's his last release, this is not Smith's strongest album. That's not to say that it's bad, but for a man that supposedly stabbed himself in the heart two times, you would expect something as biting, pained and upsetting as his 1995 self-titled release. The production is phenomenal -- the soaring opener "Coast to Coast" features jangly electric guitars, tinny piano and a booming rhythm section, for example -- and "Pretty (Ugly Before)" is overwhelmingly gorgeous. Smith's epic, Beatles-esque songwriting perkily overpowers the influence of what could be called unsubtle hints on tracks like "Fond Farewell" and "King's Crossing." Though you won't find anything nearly as gritty or despairing as "Christian Brothers," there is still the sense of malaise that keeps constant with the rest of Smith's work.\nThe most definite claim I can make about this disc is that there's no sense of finality (which you'd expect from a an album written before a suicide -- Joy Division's Closer comes to mind). It's just another step in Smith's tragically precluded artistic progression, but without a doubt it reveals how much poorer the independent music scene will be without him.