For way too many reasons , this needs to be in the 1st ten, albums that matter. It kicks ass the whole way through. She came on the scene like a hurricane, a punk poet with something to say. She didn’t want you to dance to the disco beat, she wanted you to wake up and feel the fury burning inside…
from allmusic
It isn’t hard to make the case for Patti Smith as a punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played rock & roll, featuring Lenny Kaye‘s rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of Smith‘s vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics — all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Smith is a rock critic’s dream, a poet as steeped in ’60s garage rock as she is in French Symbolism; “Land” carries on from the Doors‘ “The End,” marking her as a successor to Jim Morrison, while the borrowed choruses of “Gloria” and “Land of a Thousand Dances” are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the ’70s. Producer John Cale respected Smith‘s primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new spoken word/musical art form: Horses was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, “dancing around to the simple rock & roll song.”
[youtube]http://youtu.be/BYN10VyFSHU[/youtube]
1. Gloria: In Excelsis Deo/gloria
2. Redondo Beach
3. Birdland
4. Free Money
5. Kimberly
6. Break It Up
7. Land: Horses/land Of A Thousand Dances/la Mer (de)
8. Elegie
9. My Generation