Patti Smith Group
Wave

"I am the first Messiah without balls, the Christ of the decade is me!"

"I am the general of rock'n'roll!"

Patti Smith is the quintessential female rockstar. Not beautiful but charismatic, intelligent and brilliant, she revealed herself from a very young age as a very committed and versatile artist. She writes poetry (her love for Rimbaud is well known), some published in a collection in '73 ("Seventh Heaven and Witt"), writes lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult, a play with Sam Sheperd ("Cowboy Mouth"), acts, dabbles in photography, paints; she is an active and sensitive girl, very attentive and involved regarding the radical social and cultural upheavals between the 60s and 70s. A friend of Bob Dylan and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she lived when she was a student, the Smith soon became one of the most influential and inspired characters from the American underground music scene, in New York, a theater of sound revolutions mainly thanks to Iggy Pop's Stooges and Lou Reed's Velvet Underground.

These were years of great counter-cultural ferment, of which art and rock music in particular were the main supporters and inspirers. To stand out, it was necessary to frequent the right circle, that of Andy Warhol, first and foremost. Patti, of that counter-culture, became a regular habitué, embarking on the path that would lead her to be an icon of the New Wave. Equipped with a spirituality considered blasphemous by many and a bold and exhibitionistic feminine grit, enough to influence many artists and riot girls, Patti Smith perfectly combined the poetry of her lyrics with tense and neurotic rock. Her voice is painfully anguished and delirious, often brazen and hysterical, with such harsh peaks that they are almost unpleasant, emotional and compelling. In it, you can almost glimpse the last rivulet of that immense river of sick, dark, and painful existentialism, of which the Velvet Underground were the standard-bearers in the previous decade, with an extra dose of anger. After releasing a single with an independent label and produced by Mapplethorpe, the cover of Hey Joe, collaborating with Television's guitarist Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith made a brilliant debut with her group in Horses, followed by the excellent Radio Ethiopia, and Easter, which marked her exit from the niche circuit and granted her a certain notoriety. "Wave", from 1979, definitively consecrates her to the general public.

The album opens, without particular bite, with Frederick, a ballad dedicated to her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, with background choirs, a marked and compelling rhythm, and a gentle keyboard while the following Dancing Barefoot is quite dark with Smith's low and unusually calm voice, a pleasant and captivating track always marked by a good rhythm section and a guitar, unfortunately, too much in the background. Finally, the old Patti returns with So You Want To Be, from the pleasant initial riff marked by determined drums, with it, Lenny Kaye's guitar dominates the whole track. And she, Patti, who howls words, almost reciting them at the end. Her voice becomes lamenting and aching in the short track Hymn, a sort of pleading litany, while Revenge is a fine blues with an introduction of a bass and guitar loop that vaguely recalls I Want You (She's So Heavy) of beatlesque memory; a crescendo track characterized by majestic keyboard performances and a hysterical and acid guitar. Very interesting and, in my opinion, the best songs on the album, are Citizen Ship and Seven Ways Of Going: the former is a track whose rhythmic structure changes abruptly with a splendid hypnotic organ background and sudden electric guitar bursts. The second piece has a dark and solemn atmosphere and an obsessive rhythmic cadence, superb psych-jazz arrangements, and the Smith's vocal performance is exceptional, inspired.

Definitely inferior to the previous works, the album has the merit of being quite likeable and fairly varied and homogeneous. It represents, if you will, the terminus of the Patti Smith Group's creativity, which, unfortunately, never reached the excellent levels of the first three works again. Her creative vein that had contributed to the big bang of the New Wave was now running out. In "Wave" the unconventional spirituality of Patti is always present, who even included a photo of Pope Luciani on the cover, writing the phrase: "music is the reconciliation with God".