Smith has it covered.  Full text...

Smith's voice is still the biggest weapon in the arsenal, and she well knows how to make the most of it. The Stones' "Gimme Shelter" is a standout, all fury and dread.  Full text...

Three decades after Smith made the transition from poet to rock & roller, we still don't think of her as a singer, exactly -- more a reciter who can carry a tune, kind of. So a covers album showcasing her interpretive gifts is a questionable vehicle. And like most such albums -- there are dozens by now -- it's somewhat hit-or-miss.  Full text...

Patti Smith is musical Marmite. To devotees, she is the gimlet-eyed North Star for every woman in rock, blazing a radical, intellectual trail for everyone from Courtney to Beth Ditto.  Full text...

Patti Smith mellows out in her now sixty years and takes a stab at the past on Twelve. Not what you might think, this is straight from the heart of all things Patti and company once rallied against. And its not half bad.  Full text...

Over the years, Smith’s voice has accrued so much mystical portent one suspects that she could sing the theme to Balamory and still invest it with apocalyptic gravity. At times, though, Twelve seems designed to prove otherwise.  Full text...

Twelve is Patti Smith's covers album. There was a time, back before Dylan and The Beatles, when every album was effectively a covers album, the demarcation lines between songwriter and performer being rather more rigorously policed than in later years.  Full text...

It may not be revolutionary—in fact, if anything, it’s too safe to feel any impulse to disagree with it—but Smith’s conviction is apparent, and her commitment is respectable. It’s not a bad listen, either.  Full text...

Patti Smith is the kind of person you couldn’t get to cross the street if she didn’t want to so I’ll go with the assumption that this is, indeed, the album she wanted to make and that she wasn’t forced into it by a record label who wants to clean her up (no more spitting young lady!) and repackage her for middle America.  Full text...

It is bold, intelligent, iconoclastic and, above all, necessary.  Full text...

Yet Twelve is so neutered and anodyne, it makes The Big Chill look like Querelle by comparison.  Full text...

It's an album you listen to once, then lose. It makes you long for another comeback, the sooner the better to redeem this pointless misstep.  Full text...