PATTI SMITH

PATTI SMITH
PEACE AND NOISE (1997)
320 KBPS

Patti Smith has always been renowned for her willingness to face the darkness--and in her earlier releases she relentlessly questioned the nature of God and God's relationship to man, often in the most violent and blasphemy-laced manner possible, working her ferocity into high art.
In the 1980s, after a period of silence and following the deaths of such close friends as Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, the quality of her work began to undergo a change: she continued to face the darkness, continued to question God and God's relationship to man, but the tone was increasingly introspective, deliberately thoughtful, increasingly controlled. Then in the wake of her husband's death she reemerged with GONE AGAIN and PEACE AND NOISE. Both find her as passionate and often as outraged as ever. But here the questioning carries with it the sense that the answers are just below the surface.
Like most of Smith's work, PEACE AND NOISE is extremely hard to take in on the first listening, and my initial response to the thing was that it was one of her lesser works. But over time, and after repeated listenings, I find it every bit as powerful as the best of her best. True, as some have noted, there are no single "standout" cuts here--nothing that suddenly jumps up and bites you the way that such Smith classics as "Gloria," "Because The Night," "Dancing Barefoot," or "Gone Again" do. But the album works as unit in a way that many Smith albums do not: it is not a matter of variety here, playing jarring cuts against quieter moments, but one of long consistency.
The opening track, "Waiting Underground," is a powerful piece, bitter, outraged, and yet curiously hopeful--and the strange combination of these qualities persists throughout every selection here. While Smith remains as attacking as ever, condemning the less savory aspects of human nature with every fiber of her being ("Dead City" is a classic example), it is now the outrage of someone who perceives that reality could be substantially different from what it is, that mankind as a whole could rise above the ashes in which we wallow.
Perhaps the single most obvious statement here is "Spell," a strange, hypnotic, chant-like piece in which Smith considers the world and finds everything in it "Holy," an aspect of the God she so persistently probes. But if everything is Holy, why isn't everything different? This is the hard question she poses--and the answer seems to be because we will not have it so. We are unwilling to try hard enough. Ultimately, the album presents us with an equation of life as "noise" and death as "peace"--and the ultimate answer. It is the way home.
This is such a driven, bitter, delicately balanced recording. And while Smith is often memorable for her musical extremes, she offers none of them here--there are no screaming, rioting guitars, no nail-driven drums; it is instead a slow build of tension that coils tighter and tighter from selection to selection, relying more upon Smith's vocals and remarkable lyrics than upon instrumentation. PEACE AND NOISE is not, perhaps, the ideal album for a first-timer; it really has to be considered in the overall context of Smith's body of work. But it is a remarkably fine one. Strongly recommended.

1. Waiting Underground
2. Whirl Away
3. 1959
4. Spell
5. Don'T Say Nothing
6. Dead City
7. Blue Poles
8. Death Singing
9. Memento Mori
10. Last Call