Playing the parts Elliott Smith's parting salvo, girls who wanna be grrrls, and all for Anti- BY MATT ASHARE

Let’s get the silly stuff out of the way first. As we all know, every rocker wants to act, and, well, there’s a certain breed of actor (not, say, Meryl Streep) who wants to rock. So far, no real cure has been found for this condition, which led to Gina Gershon’s embarrassing attempt last year not only to play a grrrl rocker in Prey for Rock & Roll but to take a "real" punk band on the road. The best thing that came out of it was an IFC documentary (or was it a rockumentary?) that showed Gershon dealing with the trials and tribulations that everyday rockers have faced on their way to the top for years and years — smelly vans, crummy club plumbing, dressing rooms that seem to be growing new forms of bacteria. As she put it at one of the documentary’s pivotal moments, "Yech." Right on.

But her experiences weren’t discouraging enough to dissuade her young and desirable peers from taking the plunge. In fact, if you caught the right Warped Tour gig this summer, you might have noticed a band called Juliette & the Licks on the bill — as in Juliette Lewis. Fact is, she makes a damn good — convincing even — grrrl punk as the frontwoman of the Licks, and the band’s debut (homonymous, on Fiddler Records, due October 12) doesn’t sound half bad. That doesn’t mean Lewis has a successful rock career ahead of her. But at least she’s not embarrassing as the Avril-style singer in a pop-punk band. Somewhat scarier is the prospect of a new CD by actress Minnie Driver, whom I liked in Good Will Hunting. It seems she got hold of members of the Wallflowers and Pete Yorn’s band to record an album of her — well, let’s just quote from the bio — "sultry, bittersweet vocals with sparse, atmospheric pop and a hint of contemporary folk." Rounder’s Zoë imprint has bought into the whole farce, and the CD is slated for October 5.

Time to move on to the more serious stuff. And there’s nothing more serious than the subject of the late and much-lamented indie-turned-Academy-Award-nominee singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. The outline goes like this: phenomenally talented punk-rocker turns sensitive indie folk-rocker and helps start a movement of like-minded singer-songwriters in the great Northwest on labels like K and Kill Rock Stars. He receives an Academy Award nomination for the characteristically sad yet beautiful, spare yet melodically complex "Miss Misery," a song he wrote for the aforementioned Good Will Hunting. He lands a major-label deal with DreamWorks and releases a couple of critically acclaimed but only marginally commercially successful follow-ups. And then, last October, out of the blue, the depressive Smith commits suicide while living in Los Angeles. The last time I was in LA, I found the mural he’s pictured standing in front of on the cover of his 2000 CD Figure 8 (DreamWorks), and it was covered with graffiti. If I could sum up the content of those messages in one word, it would be "Why?"

The prolific Smith (he may have been slow to record, but he kept notebooks full of lyrics) appears to have put the finishing touches on his next album before his death. I’m not sure whether DreamWorks had dropped him or whether his contract with the label was up after Figure 8, but Epitaph’s growing Anti- imprint was able to complete a deal with Smith’s estate to release from a basement on the hill, a 15-track album, on October 19. It goes without saying that Smith fans will be combing every inch of the album for hints as to the state of mind that led to his suicide, and song titles like "A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity To Be Free" and "Fond Farewell" aren’t likely to discourage such behavior. They’ll also have the book Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing, which DaCapo will have on bookshelves by November 1. It was written by Ben Nugent, a Time and New York magazine scribe; let’s hope he got it right.

Smith isn’t Anti-’s only coup. A diverse roster that already includes country rebel Merle Haggard, soul legend Solomon Burke, the post-emo rock band Promise Ring, and comedian Eddie Izzard is set to add New Pornographers singer Neko Case and veteran post-punkers Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. In fact, if you had to survive on releases from just one label over the next couple months, you could do a lot worse than Anti-. For starters, Tom Waits is following up the pair of CDs he released on Anti- in 2002 — Alice and Blood Money (get ’em if you don’t have ’em) — with Real Gone on October 5. As is usually the case with a Waits album, this one’s a big departure from the last couple. The atmospherics of Alice and Blood Money have given way to what he describes as "primal blues, Jamaican rock-steady grooves, rhythms and melodies both African and Latin, and ‘cubist’ funk." I’m not exactly sure what "cubist funk" is, but you do get a sense of what the album’s apt to sound like from the backing band: former Canned Heat member Larry Taylor on bass and guitar; avant-guitarist Marc Ribot on guitar and "cigar box banjo"; former Primus drummer Brain Mantia; Blood Money veteran Casey X; Waits himself on percussion and turntables; Les Claypool on bass guitar; and Harry Cody of the Swedish band Shotgon Messiah on guitar and banjo.

Next up from Anti- is a pair of CDs from the venerable Cave and his Bad Seeds — Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus, both due October 26. These are the first Bad Seeds albums that Cave has recorded without Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist Blixa Bargeld. Instead, long-time Cave collaborator Mick Harvey handles the guitar work while Warren Ellis plays mandolin, bouzouki, and violin, and Jim Sclavunos and Thomas Wydler split the drumming duties; bassist Martyn P. Casey completes the rhythm section. The newest full-time member of the Bad Seeds, organist James Johnston, is reported to be featured on the new recordings, which makes me wonder how a goth-leaning rocker like Cave got along all these years without a full-time organist. In any case, one can hardly imagine Cave finding a better label than Anti-, where he can count himself among so many other hard-to-classify artists. Plus, his presence will give Jolie Holland, one of Anti-’s better up-and-coming signings, a good home. Her album, which came out this summer, is called Escondida; buy it.

As for Canadian songstress Case, who’s always kept one foot on the alt-country side of the track as a solo artist and garnered glowing press as a member of the New Pornographers, her new relationship with Anti- gets off to a promising start with a live album, The Tigers Have Spoken, due November 9. A fill-in while she records a new studio album scheduled for next spring, it also serves as a career retrospective for those who missed her solo releases on the Chicago indie Bloodshot. The 11-song set has Case backed by some former Bloodshot label mates, the insurgent country band the Sadies. And it includes a couple of new tunes — "If You Knew" and "The Tigers Have Spoken" — for folks who already have the Bloodshot CDs. Another fine addition to what’s shaping up to be the coolest indie label — sort of what the Beastie Boys were hoping to do with Grand Royal.