Yo Zushi at The New Statesman:
Though it’s true that sadness in its many forms was one of Smith’s central preoccupations, neither he nor his music were defined by it. The spare waltz that defeats Tiny Rick appears on Smith’s third solo album, 1997’s Either/Or. It’s played acoustically at an unhurried pace and combines a seductive lyric about finding solace in booze with a melody that perfectly captures its quiet desperation. In the chorus, a dark E-flat minor hits you like a gut punch because your ears expect a more optimistic E-flat major, and the song returns to that unstable chord to finish, denying you any conventional harmonic resolution. It’s a masterly composition that eclipses anything by Smith’s own idols, including the Beatles or Elvis Costello – sad, yes, but too wondrous to feel strictly morose. And he didn’t write it strung out and crying into an empty glass of Jameson. It was apparently knocked into shape while he was watching the swords-and-sandals TV show Xena: Warrior Princess.
From the beginning, Smith explored misery philosophically, treating it with respect as a facet of the human experience that was worthy of deep interrogation. He approached it without fear or embarrassment and found in it the implacable grandeur of ordinary life – its sometimes ugly beauty, unbearable but precious, and as compelling as a white-hot light bulb is to a bug at night.
more here.
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