Dead Air LP

Before Elliott Smith ever picked up an acoustic guitar alone in a room, he was tangled up in Heatmiser's 1993 debut for Frontier Records, cut in Portland with Neil Gust, Tony Lash, and Brandt Peterson banging out scrappy, melodic guitar interplay closer to Hüsker Dü and Mission of Burma than anything polished. Dead Air is rougher and hungrier than the more melodic records that followed, Cop and Speeder and then Mic City Sons, and that roughness is the whole point.