Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 06/20/2007
Run Time: 43:10
It isn't hard to make the case for
Patti Smith as a
punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the
new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played
rock & roll, featuring
Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of
Smith's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics -- all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic.
Smith is a
rock critic's dream, a poet as steeped in '60s
garage rock as she is in French Symbolism;
"Land" carries on from
the Doors'
"The End," marking her as a successor to
Jim Morrison, while the borrowed choruses of
"Gloria" and
"Land of a Thousand Dances" are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the '70s. Producer
John Cale respected
Smith's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new
spoken word/musical art form:
Horses was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, "dancing around to the simple
rock & roll song."
~William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
;)
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