“Well, I’m back…” And this may seem an odd album to re-start with. Patti Smith has been making records for a long time. Her status as a kind of combination crone-priestess (I mean this in an utterly honourable sense) and elder stateswoman is beyond question. Her concerts are still spiritually uplifting events as much as rock’n'roll shows. Meanwhile, new albums are respectfully received but add little to the legacy. Twelve isn’t about to change that and like most covers records, it’s a bit of curates egg.
It starts off strongly enough with “Are You Experienced”. Held together by Flea’s fluid exploratory bass, it comes over as a stately meditation on Hendrix’s original. Then things dip fairly sharply. “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” (yes, that song) is a pedestrian pub re-tread. If Smith’s after a drastic reinvention a la Donnie Darko’s “Mad World, she misses by a mile. Neil Young’s “Helpless” is pleasant but you woldn’t rush to but it on again. “Gimme Shelter” has wispy slide guitar line by Tom Verlaine that deconstructs the already skeletal original leads to two or three nervy notes but the band and Smith are again undone by journeyman competence.
Things look up with “Within You, Without You” and “White Rabbit” which respectively recall the arrangements on Gone Again and replace the flamenco flicker of the original with a military snare and dirgey tempo that actually works quite well. Neither are a patch on the original, though. And lets not even mention “Soul Kitchen” or “The Boy In The Bubble”…
What rescues the record is, of all things a take on Dylan’s “Changing of the Guards” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
The Dylan cover does what all great cover versions does – sends you back to the original with a heightened appreciation of what was originally under-achieved and is perhaps more fully realised by the cover. “Changing of the Guards” comes from Street Legal, one of Dylan’s most underrated sets of songs. Dylan was just about to seriously lose his way in the studio, an impasse that would continue for nearly twenty years (bar the fluke of Oh Mercy). The original is lost is a turgid murk of backing singers, horns and a seven piece rock band. Smith and her bands stripped-back, bar-band treatment works brilliantly, bringing out one of Dylan’s last masterpieces of sustained poetic flow and making it utterly her own. It’s that rarity, a single performance that makes an entire album worthwhile. It’s hypnotic, pulsing, a reverie of “menace and prayer” that Smith utterly nails with a performance at once understated and vital – “And cruel death with it’s pale ghost retreating/Between the King and the Queen of Swords.”
“Smells like..” is just plain odd. The sleeve notes describe it as a ‘back-porch’ performance. The main guitar lines are carried by a tentative banjo and the slowed tempo brings out the kind of gravel and gravitas that only Patti Smith seems able to pull off without dipping into parody. She turns the song into a knowing commentary on her own outsider status and it suits her surprisingly well. You’ll want to play it again, and that’s quite an achievement.
For the remainder, “Midnight Rider” has a pleasant lilt and the fact that Coolio has destroyed that Stevie Wonder song forever doesn’t help Patti Smith’s version much either. Buy it for the Dylan cover – why couldn’t she just do a straight album of misunderstood Dylan chestnuts? That would be worth its weight in gold.
Look, for my money, Tori Amos is as rock and roll as they come. This is a woman who suckles piglets, damn it – beat that, Osbourne. On the other hand, it’s been a few years since she put out a record that was anywhere near essential. “Scarlet’s Walk” was bland, “The Beekeeper” felt ever so slightly phoned in and the collection of covers had it’s moments but could only ever be seen as an exercise in marking time. What all three records had in common, however, where elaborate, impenetrable ‘concepts’. More work, in fact, seemed to have put in on the concepts than the songs.
“American Doll Posse” is no different in terms of an ambitious central conceit (five characters, including “Tori” sing the sings, sometimes providing backing vocals for each, emblematic of an attempt to unify the fractured feminine psyche…). Thankfully, as with portions of Neil Young’s Greendale, the concept this time seems to have at least partially reinvigorated Tori’s muse.
Things don’t start out promisingly. The one and half minute “Yo George” is as grim as it sounds. Dubya has bad policies. Abraham Lincoln is missing. Thankfully, the next three songs pick up sharply. Her best records (“Under The Pink”, “Boys For Pele”) have always had an abundance of sharp, creative arrangements and melodies underpinned by that dynamic, relentlessly exploratory piano technique – at once thunderous rhythm section and lea instrument. “Big Wheel”, “Bouncing Off Clouds” and “Teenage Hustling” live up to their predecessors, moving between edge-of-funkiness of “Big Wheel” and four-square rockers like Fleetwood Mac powered by Elton John (in 1975, that would have been a good thing, ok?).
Thereafter, it gets a bit hit and miss but with twenty one songs squashed into seventy eight minutes, there’s plenty of scope for constructing your own director’s cut. Mine included the the up-tempo pop of “Secret Spell”, “Posse Bonus”’s slightly disturbing demands to ‘eat your broccoli’ and “Dragon”, the big let’s-wrap-it-all-up ballad that concludes the whole curious affair.
At this point in time, I don’t know if anyone beyond fans is listening but if Amos dropped off your radar ten years ago, you might want to think about picking up where you left off. Me, I’m just glad of a new Tori Amos record that finally makes me (almost) listen all the way through.
You know, there’s any number of trendy items backed up on my iPod at the moment. But I just haven’t got to the point where I want to write anything about any of them.
In fact, I’ve been trying to work up enthusiasm about the new Blonde Redhead album all day without any real success. Maybe tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Henry Rollin’s favourite band at the height of their pomp:
Writing about RTX the other day bought Thin Lizzy very much to mind. Thin Lizzy were the band at my school. Everyone went to see them on the Black Rose tour. Except me. I hadn’t listened to them for maybe five years when I turned on Tommy Vance in 1986 and found myself in the middle of a tribute show to Phill Lynott whose huge, passionate heart had finally given up the long fight with smack that had killed the band in the early eighties.
Recently, I’ve been playing “Johnny The Fox” a lot. Maybe “23″ will have to wait a little longer.
The kind of record that comes dangerously close to giving rock star solo albums a good name. Bradfield’s touching “Ocean Spray” was one of the major redeeming elements of “Know Your Enemy”. “The Great Western” is a less strident, more intimate release than the last Manic Street Preachers’ album, “Lifeblood”. If it has a fault, it lies in its modesty – not something you could ever say about a Manics album.
Nonetheless, there are three or four songs here (try ‘Still A Long Way To Go’ or ‘An English Gentleman’) that would have elevated “Lifeblood” to near-classic status. Bradfield also sings better than on almost anything else I’ve heard him on, though he still has that weird, hard-to-decipher enunciation.
It’s on a big label and it has its own big website. This, on the other hand, is not. But it’s quite funny.
Patti Smith has been making records for a long time. Her status as a kind of combination crone-priestess (I mean this in an utterly honourable sense) and elder stateswoman is beyond question. Her concerts are still spiritually uplifting events as much as rock’n'roll shows. Meanwhile, new albums are respectfully received but add little to the legacy. Twelve isn’t about to change that and like most covers records, it’s a bit of curates egg.
