Elliott Smith

The biggest mistake a listener can make with Elliott Smith’s music is to search it for clues to his 2003 death. Even on his heartsick laments of drug addiction and isolation, there are glimmers of harmony or gently walking bass lines that seem to hint at better times to come.

“New Moon,” a collection of unreleased demos and outtakes from the time Smith recorded his 1997 album “Either/Or,” doesn’t answer or raise any new questions about Smith or his larger body of work. But it does reveal how thoughtful and meticulously pretty his songwriting was, even on his most intimate recordings.

Those drawn to Smith’s images of Christian Brothers liquor, crushed credit cards and devils named Angeles will have much to pore through. “High Times,” the emotional centerpiece of the album, finds Smith in his blackest mood yet on record, and plain-spoken lines such as “I don’t go where I’m supposed to go” sound like a travelogue of private, impossible pain.

But an early version of “Miss Misery,” the song whose Oscar nomination brought him unlikely fame, shows how rigorously Smith self-edited, and a winsome version of Big Star’s “Thirteen” proves that, like Tim Hardin before him, hopeless romantics can be equally both on record.

— August Brown

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.