From Rolling Stone:

Never has "folk-punk" been as classically defined as in Smith's second album [self-titled Elliott Smith], his premiere effort for the anti-corporate label Kill Rock Stars.

He spins a disorienting acoustic web of strums and plucks on guitar; his voice has all the substantiality of wet tissue. But the music burrows, digging up gems of structure, melody, and lyrical vividness that belie his naïve delivery.

He tried to distance himself from the tales of misery, shifting from second to first person as his characters — "I," "you" — get thrown out of bars, hunt down a fix buzz-brained, and fumble their love lives.

On the page, it's literary punk rock, all fury at the Man (in "Christian Brothers") and weary poems of self-examination in a substance-altered state (in almost everything else).

But the sound is hummable pop, slowed and drugged, with tricky but unshowy guitar work driving the melodies forward, and sung in a number near-whisper.

"The Biggest Lie," "St. Ides Heaven," and especially the stunning look into the head of a middle-class addict, "Needle in the Hay" (heard on the soundtrack to the 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums), are some of the loveliest songs about the dissolution of the soul ever written.