The Punk Rock Angel's New Album Is Difficult And Rewarding. By Ted Drozdowski PATTI SMITH'S NEW album isn't another Horses or even another Dream of Life. But it is another Patti Smith album, and that's noteworthy all by itself. It's not because of her iconic position in the rock and roll cult of personality, but because her renewed interest in performing and recording means she's got something she wants to say. And when Patti Smith speaks, sings, chants or intones, it's worth our time to listen. She does all four on her new Gone Again release. And at its best, the album presents Patti Smith the poet, hurling lightning-bolt-and-rose-petal images across a shifting landscape engineered by her improv-minded band. Although it includes rock songs, Gone Again isn't a song-oriented album. It comes from a place that seems too emotional to be caged in a tight verse/chorus/verse structure--too full of ideas, too full of need and want, too full of a life's observations digested and returned as thoughts, suggestions, challenges. There's pain and loss and gentleness here as well, in songs that reflect the deaths of Smith's brother, her husband, and Kurt Cobain. And there are musical lessons about freedom, about the denial of limitations, and about the nature of what a performance on a rock-marketed CD can become if left to develop without the cage of wholly predetermined structure. What there isn't is an abundance of possible hits. It's pretty much the opening "Gone Again," with its Big Rock drums-and-guitar blastoff recalling the Jimmy Iovine-produced Easter, that seems destined to carry this CD up the charts. There's a hypnotic guitar lick, Smith singing a nursery-rhyme melody then baring fangs for the chorus, and a complex lyric about honor, betrayal, and transcendence. Great bridge, too: short, sharp phrases that ricochet off one another as the band pulls back to let her sing out--"One last breath/The sky is high/The hungry earth/The empty vein/The ashes rain/Death's own bed/Man's own kin/Into the wind/Hole in life/Love knot tied/Brain undone." Many of the CD's songs have an acoustic base. Several kick off with a bright, droning acoustic-guitar strum that serves as wallpaper for Smith's lyrics or more generous instrumental flourishes like fellow art-punk veteran Tom Verlaine's thread of feedback and melody trailing through "Beneath the Southern Cross." I suspect the strumming--which is quite crude--is Smith's. She'd been studying guitar with her late husband, Fred Smith, who played in the gritty and influential MC5, as they began working toward the recording of whatever this album would have been had he not died in November 1994. The acoustic guitar gives the album a non-rock feel--at least, non-alternative-rock, which has become nearly as Top 40-driven a medium as contemporary R&B. The sense of Smith's music heading away from the mechanics of radio-savvy pop is buoyed by the striking explorations of electric-guitar and keyboard textures that course through numbers like "About a Boy," Smith's paean to Cobain, and "Fireflies," which again unfurls Verlaine's six-string-freak flag. Since improvisation has always been a part of Smith's bolder recordings and remains an essential element of her concert performances, such open-ended electric accompaniment for her poetry isn't surprising. And the acoustic notions are on par with recent stripped-down gigs she's done with longtime collaborator Lenny Kaye, as well as her well-established love for Dylan and other musicians in the folk and blues traditions. The oddest tune along those bloodlines is the country-inclined "Dead to the World." The title seems ironic, since the lyrics are an invitation to experience: "I heard me a music that drew me to dancing/Lo I turned under his spell/I opened my coat but he never came closer/I bolted the door and whispered oh well," Smith sings midway through. But she does so in a sort of Okie plainsong, a little chant that would seem comfortably sung around the campfire in a remake of Of Mice and Men. To heighten the effect, there's dulcimer on the tune as well as those nifty multiple string bends that guitarists use to mimic the sound of a crying pedal steel. So, by now you should be getting the idea there are no rock anthems on Gone Again. No "Because the Night," no "People Have the Power," no "Dancing Barefoot." Not even little anthems like "Frederick" or "Rock and Roll Nigger." Yet the scope of her latest-- with its wide panorama of sound; a band anchored by Patti Smith Group collaborators Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty; unabashedly smart, emotional lyrics; and the Bush-era (no, not George) catchy-title track--indicates she's still capable of hitmaking. Which leads us to believe she simply didn't give a shit about hits this time out, and that Gone Again is a work closer to the heart than to the charts. So if Smith's new album is difficult, that's fine. It means that after having been knocked on her ass by fate, she's once again planted her feet on the bedrock of her music. Besides, some of life's best experiences--running a marathon, climbing a mountain, love--are difficult. This article originally appeared in the Boston Phoenix.

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