Twenty years on from its initial release, Elliott Smith’s much-beloved third album Either / Or receives an Expanded Edition reissue. It summed up Smith perfectly, as his biographer states "the music kept rising but the person kept falling". Others worth a mention in dispatches include the bittersweet "Rose Parade" with the immortal opening lines "You asked me to come down and watch the parade/To march down the street like the Duracell bunny/With a wink and a wave from the cavalcade/Throwing out candy that looks like money". His songs of loss and loneliness have the broken-poet aura of Smog or Mark Eitzel, but he offsets the gloom with a hatful of damnably catchy melodies and progressions, turning suffering into pop and making it signify.

marked a turning point in Elliott Smith's career, his music was featured prominently in Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting soundtrack, which led to the singer suddenly becoming the Oscar-nominated center of attention. There are some wonderful acoustic songs on here - not least the booze-stained Between the Bars ("Drink up baby, stay up all night/with the things you could do - you won't, but you might"), the spectrally beautiful Angeles ("Someone's always coming around here, trailing some new kill" and the claustrophobic, desolate 2. On Either / Or, Smith observes a production ethic that retains a lo-fi looseness without sacrificing any sonic clarity. The late Elliott Smith has now achieved a real cult following, and is largely regarded as some kind of musical 'genius'.The gently insinuating despair of Smith's work communicates volumes about the heartbreak and alienation that is the bane of 20th century boys with too much time on their hands.

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One of our favorite Elliott Smith records in an edition of 600 copies on 'Alameda Twist' blue, pink and white colored vinyl.