Peace & Noise [Original recording reissued]

Patti Smith | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 30, 1997)
• Original Release Date: September 30, 1997
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Original recording reissued
• Label: Arista
• ASIN: B000002VTT
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #42,668 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Last year's bittersweet return Almost Gone memorialized lost friends and family in profound fashion. The deaths of beat luminaries Ginsberg and Burroughs color parts of her seventh album, but overall Smith is back on the barricades and rocking alongside her Lenny Kaye-led band. "1959," a plea for Tibet, is the catchiest, timeliest song here, and, like "Don't Say Nothing," it merits at least a dash of commercial airplay. Ain't going to happen, of course, but Smith's wisdom, apocalyptic imagery and artful invention (viz. "Memento Mori") is manna to devotees. --Jeff Bateman

Product Description

Japanese only paper sleeve pressing features the 1997 remastering. Sony. 2009. --This text refers to an alternate Audio CD edition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wandering Soul on the Burning Shore, October 3, 2003

By 

Gary F. Taylor "GFT" (Biloxi, MS USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Peace & Noise (Audio CD)

Patti Smith has always been renowned for her willingness to face the darkness--and in her earlier releases she relentlessly questioned the nature of God and God's relationship to man, often in the most violent and blasphemy-laced manner possible, working her ferocity into high art.

In the 1980s, after a period of silence and following the deaths of such close friends as Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, the quality of her work began to undergo a change: she continued to face the darkness, continued to question God and God's relationship to man, but the tone was increasingly introspective, deliberately thoughtful, increasingly controlled. Then in the wake of her husband's death she reemerged with GONE AGAIN and PEACE AND NOISE. Both find her as passionate and often as outraged as ever. But here the questioning carries with it the sense that the answers are just below the surface.

Like most of Smith's work, PEACE AND NOISE is extremely hard to take in on the first listening, and my initial response to the thing was that it was one of her lesser works. But over time, and after repeated listenings, I find it every bit as powerful as the best of her best. True, as some have noted, there are no single "standout" cuts here--nothing that suddenly jumps up and bites you the way that such Smith classics as "Gloria," "Because The Night," "Dancing Barefoot," or "Gone Again" do. But the album works as unit in a way that many Smith albums do not: it is not a matter of variety here, playing jarring cuts against quieter moments, but one of long consistency.

The opening track, "Waiting Underground," is a powerful piece, bitter, outraged, and yet curiously hopeful--and the strange combination of these qualities persists throughout every selection here. While Smith remains as attacking as ever, condemning the less savory aspects of human nature with every fiber of her being ("Dead City" is a classic example), it is now the outrage of someone who perceives that reality could be substantially different from what it is, that mankind as a whole could rise above the ashes in which we wallow.

Perhaps the single most obvious statement here is "Spell," a strange, hypnotic, chant-like piece in which Smith considers the world and finds everything in it "Holy," an aspect of the God she so persistently probes. But if everything is Holy, why isn't everything different? This is the hard question she poses--and the answer seems to be because we will not have it so. We are unwilling to try hard enough. Ultimately, the album presents us with an equation of life as "noise" and death as "peace"--and the ultimate answer. It is the way home.

This is such a driven, bitter, delicately balanced recording. And while Smith is often memorable for her musical extremes, she offers none of them here--there are no screaming, rioting guitars, no nail-driven drums; it is instead a slow build of tension that coils tighter and tighter from selection to selection, relying more upon Smith's vocals and remarkable lyrics than upon instrumentation. PEACE AND NOISE is not, perhaps, the ideal album for a first-timer; it really has to be considered in the overall context of Smith's body of work. But it is a remarkably fine one. Strongly recommended.

--GFT (Amazon Reviewer)--

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Never Not Show Up, February 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Peace & Noise (Audio CD)

When a reviewer for an ostensibly "alternative" newspaper in Dallas admitted that grunge-rock's original geigercounter Patti Smith deserved at least one star for actually showing up for the recording of "Peace and Noise" it was perfectly obvious to those of us here who are looking for a little more out of music than the apelike growlings of Matchbox 20 that the official version of the counterculture has been all but consumed. Patti Smith, who rekindled her career with "Gone Again" after raising her children, is here once more--with "Peace and Noise"-- to give us a few reasons why. "Waiting Underground," the first cut on the recording, drifts into the consciousness like an antebellum ghost across the floor of a fire-charred church, its spectrally distorted acoustic piano ciphering something chilling on its way back to us all. One gets the impression that the Cold War has just begun, or that the dead of the Confederacy are circling around the ridges of hills where they died in hails of bullets, only to have resurrected as corpses. Regardless of this theme of death that unifies "Peace and Noise" (which is dedicated to the late modernist and beat writer William Burroughs), the strange life in Smith's voice tells us much, much more. "1959," which was nominated for a Grammy for Best Female Vocal, and is also the supposed "hit" of the album, leans toward snide sarcasm--voicing as it does the sentiment of many who question American consumerism in full bloom at the end of the century--as it bends into perspective that which has been said far too often before: As horiffic things were happening in the rest of the world, Americans were content to play with their toys. "Don't Say Nothin'," a short and catchy piece about apathy and passivity, then, comes as a bit of advice. Overall, while "Peace and Noise" is less mordant than her earlier "Gone Again," its sensibility is much more public than private. The deaths of several great archetypes of America's first great cultural revolution, according to Patti Smith, are either omens or a commentary. We should listen.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She growls, gestures, preens gloriously--one of her best, March 22, 2006

By 

Frank Camm (Northern Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Peace & Noise (Audio CD)

Classic power and passion, always positive-proactive-even at its toughest. More rock then punk. No whining, screeching, thrashing; she is in control. Guitars sing out with soaring purpose. Rhythm section is rock solid, confident, never pushed. She growls, paces, gestures, preens gloriously, even when she struggles. She is never a victim. Back to basics. Velvet Underground/CBGB tough-lyrical voice of a sensate woman wrestling with the city. One of her best.