Banga

Performer: Patti Smith
Distributor: Sony Music Entertainment

Notes: Banga, Patti Smith's eleventh studio album, and her first in eight years, contains a dozen new tracks recorded with her longtime group of Lenny Kaye, Tony Shanahan, and Jay Dee Daugherty, along with guests Tom Verlaine, her children Jesse and Jackson, and Jack Petruzzelli. Among the album's selections are a ballad written in memory of Amy Winehouse ("This Is the Girl"), an exploratory, partly improvised jam about Amerigo Vespucci's journey to North America("Amerigo"), a birthday song for actor Johnny Depp ("Nine"), and a meditation on art and culture ("Constantine's Dream").

Rolling Stone (p.76) - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "The peak here is 'Constantine's Dream,' an extended anthem to artmaking that makes the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca sound rock & roll." Entertainment Weekly (p.118) - "[H]er latest feels like both a return to form and a renewal -- with Lenny Kaye's Sonic Youth-ful guitar meshing with Smith's literary lyricism..." -- Grade: A- Billboard (p.72) - "In the song 'Constantine's Dream' the veteran of New York's cutting-edge cultural scene delivers a lengthy soliloquy regarding the tension between art and nature..." Q (Magazine) (p.110) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "[A] rather charming record. 'Mosaic' warms with a soft, circling groove....A low-light delight." Mojo (Publisher) (p.89) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "Smith leads one of the best and sturdiest bands in rock...and their intricately scored psychedelia is a running high in 'Mosaic'..." Uncut (magazine) (p.78) - "'This Is The Girl,' the elegy for her fellow disciple of Ronnie Spector, Amy Winehouse, is a twinkling piece of '50s Lynch-pop drenched in blood and wine..."

One of the earliest and most important influences on punk rock (not to mention on post-punk songwriters like PJ Harvey), Patti Smith mated French Symbolist poetry with rock & roll, creating a musical style to match. In the process, she further shattered rock's gender barrier. Her 1975 album, HORSES, is one of the most seminal, acclaimed rock records of all time. Ironically, her biggest hit came with a 1978 version of Bruce Springsteen's "Because the Night." Smith spent much of the '80s and '90s away from the music business, but re-entered the fray in earnest starting with 1996's lauded GONE AGAIN.

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