‘Figure 8’ by Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith is an artist I’ve come to with little sense of order. I don’t have all his albums, and those that I have were acquired as and when the opportunity arose. Because of this, I’d paid little attention to the development of his music before this listening project. However, ‘Either/Or’, one of his early albums, was a recent listen, and the contrast between that and ‘Figure 8’ is very apparent.

Released on a major label, and with all the budgetary implications that this brings, ‘Figure 8’ is a brilliant record. The familiar aspects of Smith’s work – the fragile solo voice, the luscious Beatles-esque harmonies, the wonderfully constructed melodies – are all present, and displayed fully, but ‘Figure 8’ has a depth to its arrangement that simply wasn’t possible on his earlier records. ‘Son Of Sam’ may start the album with a fairly conventional, if great, slice of acoustic indie, but mixed in amongst the conventional tracks (‘Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud’, ‘Stupidity Tries’, ‘Junk Bond Trader’) are the wonderfully simple (‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, ‘Everything Reminds Me Of Her’) and the more ambitious. ‘Everything Means Nothing To Me’ makes very effective use of a tumbling piano line and a layered vocal track before exploding into waves of strings at the end. ‘In The Lost And Found’ is built entirely around a honky-tonk piano line – presumably played by Smith – that is hugely more impressive than any of the keyboard parts in his early work, and a real testament to his growth and development as a musician.

You could make a case for saying that ‘Figure 8’ is less immediate, less intimate, than Smith’s earlier records, and this would be a justifiable criticism, but anything it lacks in these areas is more than compensated for by its sheer quality.