Patti Smith possesses some qualities that are fast disappearing from most American rock & roll: passion, flamboyance, a sense of the epic, a belief in the music itself as a revolutionary force. As a moony high priestess of art, forever building altars to herself, she's a bore—as pretentious as a college sophomore who's just discovered decadence, as ingenuously egotistic as a spoiled five-year-old. But as a demagogic purveyor of barbed, gutbucket rock & roll, she ranks above most performers' today. At her best, she makes rock seem dangerous again.
excess and the pseudomythic baggage that's always marred her work, the music was so punchy and muscular that you could ignore those flaws, because the tunes' tight pop structures gave the singer's declamatory martial fantasies more focus and bite than they'd ever had. If
Easter was Smith's least idiosyncratic LP, it was also—partly for that same reason—her most convincing.
Clearly, Easter's success put a kind of pressure on Smith she hadn't felt before, and Wave is a very self-conscious follow-up. Success has encouraged all of this artist's worst vices—her self-indulgence and overweening preciousness—and the new record tries to have it both ways: to retain her big, newfound audience, while allowing her taste for arch, artsy self-glorification and highfalutin poetic nonsense full rein.
Produced by Todd Rundgren, Wave is a well-crafted, carefully calculated album, but its songs aren't as good or as powerful as Easter's, and the range of styles is so uncertain and contradictory that each cancels out the other. There's no single track that sets a tone for the LP, and the best numbers fail to kick in the way they should. Even the raveups that are Patti Smith's specialty don't work here, because they're so obviously designed to conceal the weakness of the material. In "Citizen Ship," for instance, Smith tries to manufacture an impressionistic epic about expatriation and the trials of refugees, but she isn't really in control of the idea. By the end, she's reduced to ranting, "Give me your tired, your poor," as the band shouts out place names behind her, simply to provide a bloated apocalyptic finish that comes out of nowhere.
The pop dynamics that held Easter together are transformed on Wave into a manipulative commercial tease that's used to draw you in on the first three songs and then abruptly abandoned in favor of a sanitized, prettified (i.e., Rundgrenized) version of Radio Ethiopia's numbingly arty formlessness. "Frederick," the opening cut, is a reprise of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith's "Because the Night," combined with the former's "Prove It All Night." Though not unpleasant, the new number, with its ingratiating "Hello It's Me" piano intro and bou
