Patti Smith - Peace and Noise

Last year's bittersweet return Almost Gone memorialized lost friends and family in profound fashion. The deaths of beat luminaries Ginsberg and Burroughs color parts of her seventh album, but overall Smith is back on the barricades and rocking alongside her Lenny Kaye-led band. "1959," a plea for Tibet, is the catchiest, timeliest song here, and, like "Don't Say Nothing," it merits at least a dash of commercial airplay. Ain't going to happen, of course, but Smith's wisdom, apocalyptic imagery and artful invention (viz. "Memento Mori") is manna to devotees. --Jeff Bateman Amazon.com

A solid effort

I listened to this the other day having only listened to it once before. I was not thrilled the last time I heard it but this time it really opened my soul to her retrospective views on life and death and the human condition. This offering made me start playing her again and because of this CD I also purchased Trampin. She is still writing some great music,she is someone that has lasted when others have burned out or take the public on a ride trying to squeeze out mediocre material just to pay the rent. Highly reccomended. August 24, 2008

Beautiful and poetic

I was walking in the park tonight, a warm dark summer night. Momento Mori came on the MP3 player; I was totally captivated - I hadn't heard it in a long time. When I got home, I gave P&N a careful listening. "Don't Say Nothing" ranks with my favorite Patti songs. Her recital of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl" is worth the price of the album. P&N has a hypnotic, almost trance-like quality, more than her rocking earliest, brilliant works. I think the negative comparisons to "Horses", "Easter", are entirely fatuous and don't take into account the maturity of the artist. Maybe I am getting older, but I really dig the tone of this album and the incredibly meaningful, poetic lyrics in every song. My family are big fans... My daughter has an excellent tattoo from the cover of Easter.
Finally, I LOVE YOU PATTI!!!! July 17, 2007

The Lioness in winter

This album gives me a sense of November weather. From the opening of Waiting underground to the amazing 10 minute track memento mori and ofcourse patti and michael stipe bringing it all back with the closing track last call. I love this album, her lyrics are at full force with 1959, painting images that leave marks all along the eyes and hands.

I actually enjoy this one more than Gone Again. But then again, I love all her albums. March 27, 2007

She growls, gestures, preens gloriously--one of her best

Classic power and passion, always positive-proactive-even at its toughest. More rock then punk. No whining, screeching, thrashing; she is in control. Guitars sing out with soaring purpose. Rhythm section is rock solid, confident, never pushed. She growls, paces, gestures, preens gloriously, even when she struggles. She is never a victim. Back to basics. Velvet Underground/CBGB tough-lyrical voice of a sensate woman wrestling with the city. One of her best. March 22, 2006

A Wandering Soul on the Burning Shore

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.

--GFT (Amazon Reviewer)-- October 3, 2003

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