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With 1996's Gone Again, Patti Smith reclaimed and returned to her throne as the only legitimate poet-rocker out there. Pretenders to the throne be damned! Smith gave you an album's worth which told her personal journey through death, grief and healing from the decade or so that lasted between Dream of Life and Gone, over a succession of alternative-folk songs that sounded as far-reaching and grandiose as Easter. Peace and Noise came out the next year, and shows that Gone Again was no fluke.
She's still got that hunger and fire under her ass that all great artists have. And while she might have made peace with the overriding death-obsessed atmosphere on her previous release, Peace and Noise is by no means a calmer album. Sure, it doesn't rock as loudly as Gone, but lyrically she's hitting just as deep. In "1959" she's exploring and expanding her memories of that transitional era when we collective lost our innocence as a nation and heralded into the irony-laced disconnected modern times. And "Spell" continues that obsession with the transitions in arts and culture by placing fragments of Allen Ginsberg's controversial poem to music.
She's also talking to us as a collective, taking a maternal view and seeing that things are not as they should be. She has raised her revolutionary flag and is ready to cause a ruckus for us and with us. Songs like "Death Singing" or "Dead City" explore urban malaise and decay. She has harnessed her proletarian fury into something beautiful to engage with.
But it wouldn't be a Patti Smith album without some overly long and complicated spoken-word dirge that's dizzying, exhausting and the highlight of its respective album. And on here it's "Memento Mori." She tells a labyrinthine story about a few characters before expanding outwards and telling us of our ancestors, our mortality, and to do something before it all comes to an end.
It's always a welcome experience to hear Patti Smith, and while Peace and Noise isn't quite as great as Gung Ho or Gone Again, it's still a very good album. It always makes me happy to hear her stand up, shaking her fists and readying herself for change. Perhaps the title should have been more about seeking peace through the noise? DOWNLOAD: "Memento Mori"
