Roman Candle

Elliott Smith’s raspy, hissy, four-tracked first album, re-released this year, has a strange hard-to-pin down groove and edge to it that I think had its origins in more eclectic and ironic contemporaries like (early) Beck and The Folk Implosion, but which Smith stripped bare and overlaid with some very unironic lyrics about domestic violence, unwanted pregnancies and heartache. And as circling, urgent chord sequences seem to literally pick at the issues at hand, his vocal sounds more pained in retrospect than it probably ever did at the time. A very fine record.