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Last year’s freshly posthumous From A Basement on a Hill was slightly overwrought and generally a huge disappointment. With New Moon, a truer version of Smith’s musical legacy has finally surfaced. Comprised of recordings from his early days on Kill Rock Stars, the record was painstakingly mixed and mastered in the same mold as his early albums, by Smith archivist and Tape Op editor Larry Crane. Featuring mostly outtakes from the Either/Or sessions, this is the record that Smith purists have been craving for years. This 24-track double LP of supposed “leftovers” is as strong as anything Smith created in the years that followed Either/Or, and it paints a vision of a songwriter who, armed with his whispery vocals and acoustic guitar, was literally overflowing with amazing songs in the mid-1990s. It’s a shame when a brilliant songwriter’s legacy is plundered or sold off like a tabloid garage sale, but now that Smith’s tragic story has faded from headlines, it’s finally time to remember what drew us to the guy in the first place.
