The Good: Some interesting lyrics, Sense of musical invention, Decent rock and roll
The Bad: Vocals are pretty lousy, Overall mood is more dull than rebellious
The Basics: A good album, Patti Smith clearly paves the way for other female rockers with Horses, which is still far from a perfect album.
As a reviewer, I have standards and as one who tries to create a uniform standard for evaluating works, I am one of the few who has no problem publicly explaining my various reviewing criteria. Even so, it is actually very rare that I have to go back and do a literal evaluation to make a regimented review. What I mean by that is that for my music reviews, I rate everything on a ten-point scale. There are three points for lyrics, three for vocals, three for instrumentals and one point for overall mood/production/theme (it's a fairly nebulous point for music!): it is very rare these days that I actually have to sit down and figure out where an album stands by the numbers like that. More often than not, because I have written so many reviews and experienced so much music, I simply listen to an album eight times and I have a strong idea of where it fits into the pantheon of music I have heard.
For the first time in quite some time, I found myself challenged by an album to figure out where it actually fit and having standards actually helped me quite a bit. In a year when I have been expanding my music history knowledge by listening to the likes of Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt, I was pretty excited when someone recommended I give Patti Smith a chance. So, I picked up her debut album Horses and after (literally) eleven listens, I was lost as to how to review it.
First, Horses is decent and interesting and easy to listen to, but it left me feeling more ambivalent than anything else. It is easy to hear how Patti Smith naturally leads to rockers like Joan Jett and no doubt many of the female pop-rock artists I enjoy, but largely Horses is not an album I will miss when I put it on the shelf after this review. Prior to this, the only experience I had with Patti Smith's work was from the television show Millennium. The second season of Millennium (reviewed here!) closes with an astonishing season finale which utilized the song "Land: Horses Land Of A Thousand Dances La Mer (De)" to depict one character's descent into madness. It's amazing and the music fit it perfectly and helped to truly create a mood and tell a story. So, if anything, I came into Horses psyched.
With nine tracks, clocking in at 46:41, Horses is inarguably an auspicious debut for Patti Smith. Eight of the nine tracks are co-written by Patti Smith and only "My Generation" did not have her lyrics. She is not credited with playing any instruments on the album, though she is often seen with a guitar; limited as I am by the liner notes, it does appear she sang and co-wrote her own songs, but did not play an instrument. Similarly, she is not credited with any sort of production credit, so how much of Horses is her vision and how much was a studios is up for some debate.
Lyrically, though, Horses is an interesting album, if not for what it says but for sometimes the risks it fails to take. Patti Smith is a progressive, a rebel and a poet. She is credited as laying much of the foundation of punk music and many of the tracks on Horses have a frenetic, rock and roll feel that mixes storytelling, some shrieking and lyrics which rebel against the established order of things, including some swearing. But for a feminist pioneer, Smith fails to capitalize on her unique position.
The most prominent example of this comes on the first track "Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)." Smith, who by all accounts I could find before penning this review, is a strong-willed, heterosexual woman. Given that, her feeling the need to appeal to the rather standard male-centered listener and paradigm with lines like "Put my spell on her here she comes / Walking down the street here she comes / . . . Waltzing through the hall in a pretty red dress / An oh, she looks so good. Oh, she looks so fine / And I got this crazy feeling that I'm gonna make her mine" ("Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)"). Yes, I'm wondering if she's supposedly such a rebel who is going to make her mark in what had been primarily a man's industry, why she's not singing about going out there and pursuing the man she wants. What, punk women aren't supposed to be assertive? Punk men are supposed to go out and work for the punk women, but punk women aren't supposed to hunt for their hunks? Maybe I'm missing something about punk, feminism or rebellion. The song sounds forceful and demanding, but ultimately, it still fits into a remarkably male-driven paradigm of courting rituals.
Patti Smith does seem to have a pretty strong mastery of poetic lines, though. She has the ability to establish a mood quite powerfully as she does on "Elegie" with lines like ". . . My head is aching as I drink and breathe / Memory falls like cream in my bones / Moving on my own / There must be something I can dream tonight / The air is filled with the moves of you / All the fire is frozen yet still I have the will . . ." Long before she gets to the closing lines, she clearly establishes a feeling of longing, of missing those who are not with her. She undeniably creates a mood with almost every song she performs, from the longing and loss on "Elegie" to the general sadness ("Break It Up") to outright rebellion ("My Generation"). And it is not like she is without a sense of humor; "Free Money," one of the few anti-capitalist rock and roll anthems is rich with tongue-in-cheek irony.
And then there is "Land: Horses Land Of A Thousand Dances La Mer (De)." A truly unique rock anthem, "Land" has amazing diction, strong imagery and tells an intriguing story. Apocalyptic and dark this is the musical equivalent of a bad drug trip. It is expressive and evocative, moody and magical in a disturbing way. Smith mixes frenetic references to dance in with the collapse of Johnny who begins to collapse with "the scream he made [my heart] was so high / [My heart] pitched that nobody heard no one heard / That cry no one heard [Johnny] the butterfly flapping / In his throat his fingers nobody heard he was on that bed / It was like a sea of jelly and so he seized the first / His vocal chords shot up [possibility] like mad pituitary glands . . ." ("Land: Horses Land Of A Thousand Dances La Mer (De)"). Like deciphering a dream, the song is one you can listen to over and over again, be moved by the guitars, piano and strong bass and take a lifetime to try to figure out. It is intense and one of the most impressive percussion-driven tracks I've ever heard.
That said, Horses is largely a mixed bag when it comes to the instrumentals. There are screeching guitars on tracks like "My Generation" combined with the beating of drums that is forceful and expressive. There is works because the whole song is singing about rebelling, so the sloppy sound helps to "show" the story instead of simply "telling" it. The resulting sense of imagery and power comes through quite nicely to make the statement the lyrics are making.
But on other tracks, like "Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)" rock well but in a way that does not distinguish itself. If anything, songs like that prove that Smith can rock, but "Redondo Beach," "Birdland" and "Free Money" simply reiterate that. They are not bad musically, but they are somewhat undistinguished, generic rock tracks that blend together instrumentally in a rather obvious guitar/bass/drums formula.
And where the album suffers the most in my rating system is in the vocals. Patti Smith can sing - moments of "Land" and "Break It Up" prove that. But she mumbles through "Redondo Beach," screeches through much of "Birdland" and allows her accompaniment overwhelm her vocals on "Break It Up." She seldom enunciates and I suppose my view is that if you are going to yell at your listeners (as she does on "My Generation") the least you should do is make yourself clear. Smith has a different musical vision and from a classical sense, her vocal stylings illustrate a narrow range and lack of expressive technique.
In the end, though, Horses is a good, if only slightly above average album. Anyone interested in the history of women in rock and roll will certainly want to pick up Horses to listen to, but it is somewhat naive to argue that just because Patti Smith paved the way for those who came after that she got it all right on her first outing.
The best track is "Land: Horses Land Of A Thousand Dances La Mer (De)" and "Birdland" simply did not grab me.
For other intriguing women in rock, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Redbird - Heather Nova
Two Suns (Deluxe) – Bat For Lashes
My December - Kelly Clarkson
6.5/10
For other music reviews, be sure to check out my Music Review Index Page for an organized listing.
© 2012, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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