Smith, Patti: Horses (CD)

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".

1. Gloria
2. Redondo Beach  
3. Birdland
4. Free Money
5. Kimberly 
6. Break It Up
7. Land
8. Elegie