Elliot Smith's either/or - big, but still sweet

Elliott Smith is that exquisite rarity, a songwriter who conscientiously practices as a craft the forming of little worlds in music. That he takes this task seriously is borne out in the way every element of melody and structure has a reason for being where it is. In a nutshell, this means that either/or, Elliott's latest album on Kill Rock Stars, holds up to repeated listening, rarely getting stale, constantly unfolding new levels of meaning and rightness.

People who have been familiar with Elliott's music for some time wondered, while waiting expectantly for this boy-with-guitar's latest effort, whether the new collection of songs would treat listeners to the same obscure lyrics, surprising chord progressions and breathy vocals as on Elliott's self-titled release of last year. Elliott Smith was a sublime album, and judging from this new effort, Smith has been reluctant to abandon entirely the intricately shy stylings that served him so well there without exploring their limits and possibilities just a bit further.

Here as always, Smith is at his best when he's offering intimate gems of songs, compact and dreamy, with only an acoustic guitar to accompany his voice, at times sounding like two or three of him singing, in unison, just a little too high. For beginners, there's gorgeous "angeles" which, with its layered finger-picking, mysterious whistling-wind synthesizer effects and vocal flourishes accumulating like snow flurries, sticks in your head for days.

Then there are the songs like "between the bars," which all but demand that you close your eyes to cherish the way he'll repeat a chord progression, changing one note at a time, flatting one tone or adding a dissonance up top, until the last line of the chorus is a distant cousin of the one from which it evolved. Then, once you're so absorbed in the harmonies that you don't even hear the phone ringing, you'll zero in on the words and wonder about the sincerity of this singer encouraging you to get drunk as he promises to silence all the "people you've been before that you don't want around anymore."

Is this Smith's promise to us - well-crafted songs do have an inscrutible power - or a promise made to him one night and broken the next morning? His lyrics sound confessional, but in such an oblique way that you can't always tell what he's confessing. Maybe that's because he doesn't know how to put it any more clearly, which makes you feel honored and special that he's making the effort to tell you anything at all.

Don't think that either/or is all bedrooms and whispers. There are more songs here that could be described as medium-sized, as opposed to the dependably small character of his previous songs, some of which bore unobtrusive names like "no name #1," "no name #2," and so on. ("no name no. 5" is easily either/or's most forgettable track, and Elliott's singing "everybody's gone at last" hints that maybe he wanted it that way).

This album makes more use of non-brushed drums, which sometimes sound wrong and annoying until you think it through for a few minutes. The way the drums drown out the intricate finger-picking in "alameda" makes sense for a song whose words are about somebody who maintains all their friends "in a constant state of suspense / for your own protection over their affection," and the excessive use of cymbals in "ballad of big nothing" are exactly what somebody called "big nothing" would sound like, if he were a sound.

Granted, it does take some work to uncover these forms of appropriateness, and even though it's a worthwhile labor of love, the next step for Smith will certainly be to figure out how to make a larger sound that belongs with the meaning of the songs and doesn't jar listeners right away. Still, in a contest between either/or's dilemma and the vapid niceness of some pop musicians working today, the former would come out on top. Just as poems that stop telling you secrets after the second reading don't usually survive for too many years, initial discordancies that can be figured out and excused have more staying power than prettiness that offers nothing to probe. The best musicians combine both these elements, and Smith is well on his way to a creative fulfillment of this task.

This isn't to say either/or's bigness always works perfectly in the long run. At best, like on "picture of me" and "punch & judy," he comes out sounding enough like the lighter songs on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band that it couldn't be accidental - not just because of the uncanny resemblence his voice bears, on certain lines, to Paul McCartney's. (Incidentally, he also has his Paul Simon moments.) At worst, namely the track "cupid's trick," the full rock band is oppressively heavy and clunky, neglecting nearly all the strengths of Smith's music while failing to provide a compelling alternative.

In the end, Elliott Smith is likely to win the most hearts with the album's final track, "say yes," in which, over bare-bones guitar accompaniment, he proclaims dopily, "I'm in love with the world / through the eyes of a girl / who's still around the morning after." After eleven songs ranging from the self-pitying ("when they clean the street I'll be the only shit that's left behind") to the nasty ("you'll be the victim of your own dirty tricks"), it's a gift that he closes the album with this singular expression of doubtful hope: "Instead of falling down / I'm standing up the morning after.../ I could be another fool / or an exception to the rule / you tell me." Since we, in listening to him, are "the world," this is a love song to us, and it's not just up to the one girl to "say yes" as he pleads; it's up to us as well. After spending 45 musical minutes with this self-described "naive unsatisfiable baby," we may well be ready to oblige him.