Muscle gets stronger when it encounters resistance. On her ninth album, Patti Smith’s music is sounding buffer than it has in years largely because the singer has redefined herself in political and aesthetic opposition to the Bushwhackers. Anger is an energy, and Trampin’ is often a testimony to the power of art as a full-bore expression of dissent.
It ain’t no Horses mind you, but then little is. Even today, tunes like ‘Birdland’ and the title suite remain unequalled fusions of spoken word and visceral din. But since the 25 years following her post-Wave sabbatical, Smith has veered from misjudged MOR mainstream rock (Dream Of Life) to fertile left-field folk (Gone Again). She’s written amazing elegies to fallen comrades and kin (‘Going Under’), but sometimes her poetics have gotten flawed and fuzzy, as if the mere capitalisation of portentous elemental words (Fire, Illumination etc) was in and of itself enough to evoke French symbolism.
But last year’s storm-the-barricades acoustic show in Belfast suggested she’d rediscovered her sense of humour as well as her righteous ire. Trampin’ bears this out absolutely, opening with the garage rock come-all-ye of ‘Jubilee’. Smith’s vocal power is at its optimum; brash and bolshy on the grimy ‘25th Floor’-type strut of ‘Stride Of The Mind’ and the obstinate throb of ‘My Blakean Year’, unfussy and assured on ‘Cash’, tender and controlled on the lovely ‘Mother Rose’ or the Easter-y atmospherics of ‘Cartwheels’.
The band – Lenny Kaye, Tony Shanahan, Oliver Ray and Jay Dee Daugherty – have been recorded cinema verite style by Pat McCarthy, and they sound as sharp as if playing at gunpoint, a growling eight-legged beast prowling circles around improv pieces such as ‘Gandhi’ and the tour de force ‘Radio Baghdad’, whose obvious antecedent is the title track of her dense and difficult second album Radio Ethiopia. This tune provides a sonic re-enactment of last March’s maniacal fireworks display, a freeform extemporisation that evolves from 6/8 metallic jig to white reggae to guitarmageddon. “You wanna come and rob the cradle of civilization… and you read Genesis,” Smith spits, “Shock and awe/Like some, some/Imagined warrior production/Twenty-first century/No chivalry involved/No Bushido.” At one point over the tune’s 12 minutes, the music lulls into dub doldrums, out of which she contrives a lullaby – “Go to sleep/Sleep my child/Sleep/Sleep/ Sleep…” – before a blood curdling holler of “Run! Run! Run! Run!” When she walks away from the body of this song, it lies in the silence like a gauntlet nobody wants to pick up.
But there is a resolution of sorts in the form of a gorgeous, granny-glasses reading of the old spiritual ‘Trampin’, lifted from the songbook of American contralto Marian Anderson: “I’m trampin’, trying to make heaven my home.”
Young Arthur might approve.