Either/Or

Either/Or is the album on which Elliott Smith's songwriting fully came into focus — a twelve-song set that bridges the stripped-down, bedroom-recorded folk of his first two records and the more expansive pop arrangements that followed. The hushed acoustic songs, delivered in his famously soft, doubled voice, are the record's centerpiece: intricate fingerpicked guitar set against plainspoken melodies that sound inevitable on first hearing. The album's reputation has grown steadily since release, and retrospective consensus ranks it among the finest records of the 1990s, with reviewers regularly calling it the defining statement of his career.

The record is deliberately modest in sound — much of it was recorded at home or in small studios, sometimes on a four-track — and that lo-fi warmth is central to its appeal. The louder, band-driven tracks show real pop ambition, but critics have long observed that the fidelity of those fuller arrangements doesn't quite match their reach, and that the humbler material is where the record is strongest. A minority of contemporary reviewers found the whisper-quiet delivery and pervasive downheartedness one-note, and a few felt the album too understated to be a major statement; the album's later canonization suggests time sided with the enthusiasts.

The Kierkegaard-derived title sets the tone: these are songs of existential choice, of wanting and not wanting at once, circling addiction, loneliness, and self-sabotage against a backdrop of Portland streets and late-night hours. Critics largely agree on the quality — the real disagreement is over which mode, the bare acoustic confession or the pop-leaning experiment, is the truer Smith, not whether the record matters. Even the twentieth-anniversary reissue split opinion, with some finding the remaster revelatory and others feeling it polished away the grainy quality that made the original feel lived-in.