April 26, 2004

Countering War With Calls for Peace

''Trampin''
Patti Smith

Family values — motherhood, faith, patriotism — meet utopian dreams on "Trampin' " (Columbia), Patti Smith's first album since 2000. It's her reaction to the state of the nation and the world after Sept. 11, 2001, and war in Iraq, and it's full of her shamanic ambitions: to be visionary, conscience and healer. Although Ms. Smith made her name in the 1970's as the poet of the punk era, she has always been closer to the music and spirit of the 60's. "Trampin' " faces a wartime era with calls for peace, love, revolution and joy, starting with a three-chord rocker called "Jubilee," which insists on "dancin' in a freedom ring."

Ms. Smith has a lot on her mind: war in the Middle East, a search for what's holy, the cycle of generations. She often takes a mother's perspective. In the album's longest, most mutable song, the 12-minute "Radio Baghdad," Ms. Smith's declamation leaps from the history of Mesopotamia and Baghdad — "city of scholarship, science, city of ideas, city of light" — to the present-day "city in ashes." At one point a mother starts to sing her child to sleep, then suddenly shouts: "Run! Run! Run!" The music of "Radio Baghdad" isn't as unhinged as its free-form 1976 predecessor, "Radio Ethiopia," but it never slackens as the band jams through drones, reggae and furiously churning one-chord rock. "Shock and awe, like some crazy TV show!" Ms. Smith's character rails. "They're robbing the cradle of civilization."

At 57 Ms. Smith has made the most diverse music of her career. "Trampin' " encompasses improvisational poetry-and-song excursions and terse parables, twangy rockers and layered productions that recall 1960's pop. The title song is a gospel tune, from Marian Anderson's repertory, about "trying to make heaven my home"; Ms. Smith sings it accompanied by her daughter, Jesse, on piano. In "Peaceable Kingdom" the production ripples and swells with a string ensemble, while two songs about mothers and daughters, "Mother Rose" and "Cartwheels," stack up vocal harmonies and prettily plucked strings like psychedelic pop circa 1967.

Ms. Smith has never exactly been inhibited as a singer, but she pushes her voice on "Trampin'." She lets loose a near yodel in "Jubilee," which picks up the hint of country as a fiddle joins the band. "Gandhi," the album's other open-ended incantation, begins with a haggard, bluesy moan; by the end Ms. Smith is belting "Long live revolution" over exultant garage-rock. Meanwhile, in "Stride of the Mind," about an encounter with a desert saint, Ms. Smith applies her best Bob Dylan phrasing to lines like "I'm no Sufi, but I'll give it a whirl."

A few songs stumble under their ambitions; it is hard to overcome a title like "My Blakean Year." But even the misfires are the work of a songwriter who is still trying to turn rock into revelation.

'A Boot and a Shoe'
Sam Phillips

Sam Phillips polishes her miniaturist credentials on "A Boot and a Shoe" (Nonesuch), with 13 songs in 34 minutes. She doesn't rush the music, which bounces along most of the time with an oompah somewhere between Kurt Weill and British skiffle. But she strips away introductions, solos and nearly anything else that might digress from the intimacies of the songs. Ms. Phillips has often used her gift for imagery to step back and observe the effects of desire. This time she uses it to get closer, placing herself inside romances that are collapsing or stumbling back to their feet.

Her voice has an after-hours haze as she sings lines like, "My lies are never big enough/I use the truth to cover up" or "I've been wanting to touch you since we met/You don't give a girl a chance to forget." As the album ends she promises, "Help is coming," only to add, "one day late."

The arrangements on "A Boot and a Shoe" are virtually unplugged, built on homely sounding acoustic guitars and the canny illusion that the musicians have taken up whatever else is at hand: a bass-drum thump, a piano, an upright bass, a rattle or two, brushes on a snare drum. Every so often a small string section turns up. There are hints of blues and gospel, but most of the songs could come from a rustic cabaret that is worried about waking the neighbors.

"A Boot and a Shoe" is the second virtually unplugged album Ms. Phillips has made for Nonesuch with her producer and husband, T Bone Burnett, following "Fan Dance" in 2001. They're trying in part to separate Ms. Phillips's songs from her most pervasive influence, the Beatles. She can't resist Lennon-McCartney techniques like major-to-minor chord changes, and songs like "Julia" and "Mother Nature's Son" hover in the background of the album, along with hints of Tom Waits. But Ms. Phillips also has the Beatles' great virtue — natural-sounding melodies — and her restraint makes them all the more alluring.