Gone Again

Rolling Stone (5/13/99, p.64) - Included in Rolling Stone's "Essential Recordings of the 90's." Rolling Stone (6/27/96, pp.53-54) - 4 Stars (out of 5) - "...GONE AGAIN is Smith's mourning album....[it is] the most focused and direct work Smith has done yet--clear-eyed even when it can't be dry-eyed and remarkably free of even the most excusable kind of self-pity..." Spin (8/96, p.95) - 7 (out of 10) - "...Nothing in her back catalogue prophesies her current music's hallucinatory strangeness. Though the songs shift from sturdy bar-band vamps to thorny, open-ended art rock and simple folk, the arrangements stay skeletal, the mood gloomy..." Entertainment Weekly (6/21/96, pp.62-64) - "...she's a pushing-50 widow with two children who has decided to reinvest in the healing power of music and career. Her losses are our gains." - Rating: A- Q (8/96, p.120) - 4 Stars (out of 5) - "...The way she delivers a lyric--as Dylan might, if he'd been born a girl and practised his scales--is ofen worth way more than what it says....contemplation is the order of the day....Throughout, there's an undertow of portent, effective because subdued..." Alternative Press (10/96, p.184) - 4 (out of 5) - "...Smith has, in essence, offered us some intangible gifts-an album's worth of wisdom and strengh in an era of deconstruction and decay..." Musician (9/96, p.87) - "...Informed by the deaths of her husband, brother, and Kurt Cobain, GONE AGAIN marks a mournful return, as opposed to the triumphantly blasphemous resurrection of EASTER. Patti the Sadder and Occasionally Wiser..." Village Voice (2/25/97) - Ranked #13 in the Village Voice's 1996 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll. NME (Magazine) (7/13/96, p.46) - 6 (out of 10) - "...Patti Smith comes not to make our heads spin, but to make our hearts bleed....grief set to music....GONE AGAIN...[is] a spectacularly downbeat record...instilled...with...tenacity..."