Description
Patti Smith – Horses
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.”
Tracklist
Gloria | (5:54) | ||
A1.1 | In Excelsis Deo | ||
A1.2 | Gloria (Version) | ||
A2 | Redondo Beach | 3:24 | |
A3 | Birdland | 9:16 | |
A4 | Free Money | 3:47 | |
B1 | Kimberly | 4:26 | |
B2 | Break It Up | 4:05 | |
Land | (9:36) | ||
B3.1 | Horses | ||
B3.2 | Land Of A Thousand Dances | ||
B3.3 | La Mer(de) | ||
B4 | Elegie | 2:42 |