26. Patti Smith, "Horses"

 

It was probably a conflict of interest for ur-rock critic Lester Bangs to review this album for Creem, a music magazine that existed once and that he famously wrote for, when it came out in 1976, because Bangs and Smith were already friends and Bangs, in fact, had promoted Smith's work.  The review is typically Bangs, wild and free-associative:

Which is not to say that there's not musical sophistication working here; it's just that it's gut sophistication, unfaltering instinct rather than the clammily cerebral approach of the old "poetry and jazz" albums.  Horses is a commanding record, as opposed to demanding—you don't have to work to "understand" or like it, but you can't ignore it either; it refuses to be background music, stops the action in the room when it's on, and leaves its effects when it's over whether the listeners like it or not.

Each song builds with an inexorable seethe, a penchant for lust and risk that shakes you and never lets you forget you're listening to real rock'n'roll again at last.  Meanwhile, every song contains moments that go beyond raunch into emotional realms that can give you chills.  In "Birdland" it's the breathtaking "It was as if somebody had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars and they started to slip"; in "Break It Up," Patti's truly cosmic sequence of "I cried 'Help me please'/Ice it was shining," and suddenly through that line you can actually hear her hitting her chest metronomically with her fist, leading into "My heart it was melting..."

No one gets to question Lester, but I'm gonna come out and say it: I don't really like this album.  Once again, cue up the tired explanation of the difference between appreciating something for its artistic merit and its undeniable influence (I think Blondie's entire sound, for example, is more or less based on this record fused with disco, and this is R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe's favorite record) and not really liking it on a personal level, but here we are.  A lot of it is more spoken word than singing, which is fine, but not really my thing.  

This is a top 30 album and so of course there are moments that reach even my malignant and abandoned heart.  "Land," a nine-minute, three-part epic that weaves through 50s rock and proto-punk and tells a harrowing story of homosexual rape and travel through space and time and drug use and murder maybe?  It's undeniably powerful and I can easily see how this was groundbreaking at the time and continues to affect so many people to this day.

"Redondo Beach" is basically a new wave reggae song, presaging Blondie's 1980 "The Tide Is High," spinning a dark tale of a woman who commits suicide after an argument with the song's narrator.  It's fine, I guess, if you like that kind of thing.  And the title track, "Gloria," which borrows extensively from the rock staple of the same name by Them, definitely rocks.

All in all, it's an appreciate but don't love.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? No.