Horses

Rolling Stone (10/31/02, p.135) - Ranked #5 in Rolling Stone's "Women In Rock: The 50 Essential Albums" - "...Rock & roll poetry was a bore until this Jersey girl showed up..." Rolling Stone (12/11/03, p.110) - Ranked #44 in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums Of All Time" - "...A statement of faith in the transfigurative powers of rock & roll..." Q (5/02 SE, p.141) - Included in Q's "100 Best Punk Albums". Q (11/96, p.154) - 5 Stars (out of 5) - "...the brittle rock and wide-eyed transcendental journeying of 1975's accepted classic HORSES has lost none of its thrill..." Vibe (12/99, p.158) - Included in Vibe's 100 Essential Albums of the 20th Century Melody Maker (7/13/96, p.50) - Bloody Essential Mojo (Publisher) (p.124) - 5 stars out of 5 - "[W]hat still stuns is Smith's reverie-like, stream-of-consciousness delivery." NME (Magazine) (10/2/93, p.29) - Ranked #31 in NME's list of The Greatest Albums Of All Time. NME (Magazine) (9/18/93, p.19) - Ranked #8 among The Greatest Albums Of The '70s - "...the words were monumental--an exceptional tribute to creativity unhinged..." NME (Magazine) (7/20/96, p.45) - 9 (out of 10) - "...Here is rock from the point of view of a gifted writer who has reinvented herself as an alien creature, reared on Jean Genet and Rimbaud..."

It isn't hard to make the case for Patti Smith as a punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played rock & roll, featuring Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of Smith's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics -- all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Smith is a rock critic's dream, a poet as steeped in '60s garage rock as she is in French Symbolism; "Land" carries on from the Doors' "The End," marking her as a successor to Jim Morrison, while the borrowed choruses of "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances" are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the '70s. Producer John Cale respected Smith's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new spoken word/musical art form: Horses was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, "dancing around to the simple rock & roll song." ~ William Ruhlmann