Horses is a balancing act. Patti Smith, in the sympathetic hands of producer John Cale, crafts an album that is at once cerebral and mindless, simple and complex, progressive and classicist. And while you might expect the attempt at corralling and curating these disparate elements into a single, workable composite to sound forced, it ends up resulting in a loose and compelling whole, rolling along to its own hybridized rhythms. Smith pushes pop music's tolerance of poetic forms to the limit, but she also evokes the ghost of pop songs past, singing bits of Van Morrison's "Gloria" and Fats Domino's "Land of 1000 Dances" when the mood strikes her. Fittingly, the cover art is a Robert Mapplethorpe photo of Smith looking androgynous. On songs like "Birdland," her voice ranges everywhere, from a sexy, steady, neo-Beat spoken word, to a low, operatic, manly moan to a pinched, nasal, Yoko Ono yelp. Cale's experience in co-creating the diverse styles of The Velvet Underground serves Smith well. The vocals - moving to the meter of her poetry - turn on a dime and require song structures to be fluid and accommodating. However, it would be glib to think of the instrumentals as merely unobtrusive background noise. This is not simply poetry with a backbeat and the studio band is no less inventive and dynamic than the lyricist they back. On "Free Money," which comes in about halfway through, it is difficult to discern whether she is singing to the music or the musicians are playing to her voice. That kind of delightful ambiguity is a good representation of what this album is all about. It might be cliché to say that these songs work on several levels, but it wouldn't make it any less true. If you like your music to be sophisticated, you can listen intently to Smith's lyrics and decode them to whatever extent you are able. If, however, you prefer to turn on, tune in, and rock out, well, you can do that, too. Grade: B+
