Female Voices

Post by **Animavore** » Tue Apr 28, 2009 8:15 am

Enya

Aretha Franklin

Yer one from Bat For Lashes.

Yer one from Portishead.

Bjork

Post by **Xamonas Chegwé** » Tue Apr 28, 2009 6:07 pm

Patti Smith

Like many people of my age (bloody old!) my first encounter with Patti Smith came in 1978 when she had a worldwide hit with Because The Night, a song written jointly by Patti and Bruce Springsteen. Unlike many people, especially this side of the Atlantic, that was not my only encounter with Ms Smith.

I heard the single on the radio and liked it. A couple of months later, I saw it in a box of ex-jukebox singles that they used to sell in the local newsagent and snapped it up. I was fascinated with the B side, a track called Godspeed. Where the A side was upbeat punk-pop, the flipside was a slow, piano-driven, angry dirge, complete with indecipherable lyrics and vocals that sounded like they had been wrenched forcibly from the soul. (At around the same time I had had a similar experience with Siouxsie and the Banshees' Hong Kong Garden, but I digress... )

I played the single to death - both sides - and then pretty much forgot about her until a friend played me the Easter album about a year later. I was mesmerised by how good it was and went out and bought it as soon as I could find an affordable second-hand copy (I was poor back then.) I love that album. I love the cover. Patti has never been a great beauty and has always cultivated a rough, androgynous look but she is sexy as fuck on that cover; the hands up in her hair, the thin vest stretched over her boyish breasts, the look of nonchalant disregard, even the hairy armpits! And the music, and the poetry, and that voice, that voice!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI-_4-4o ... re=related[/youtube]

It's just the way that she can turn a simple two or three chord riff into an epic sound with that voice, fitting her words, whether spoken, sung or shouted, into and around the rhythms and chords. She rides the currents of the song like a jazzman - but this is not jazz - Patti doesn't improvise much, although it seems like most of her songs are made up on the spot. Watch her live and, if you know the songs from the albums, you will hear very little variation - it's all planned.

After Easter, it was a good few years before I bought another Patti Smith album, although I did hear a few of her later discs. Once again, it was that period of my life where money was short and travelling meant that I couldn't buy many albums. It was while working in Bristol that a colleague played me the album Horses. Now you can call me stupid if you like, but I had no idea that she had recorded an album before Easter! I just assumed that it was her first. This was before there were any interwebz, so finding out such facts meant looking in a book, or talking to someone that knew - fuck, things were primitive!

Anyway, Horses was an incredible album, especially when considering the year it was released - 1975. It sounds so raw, edgy and so punk. The twin centrepieces of the album are the extended tracks Birdland and Horses, both allowing Patti time to work her way into the song and build things up and down through the emotions. The opener though, a cover of Them's Gloria, is the track that first grabbed me by the balls - just listen to the opening of this track (those words weren't written by Van Morrison btw!) and then factor in the lesbian implications of a woman singing a song about lusting after another woman and think of the impact that this must have had in 1975.

After that I was truly hooked (odd that it had taken so many years after my initial infatuation but that is life I suppose) and I gathered in all of her other albums. There are some great tracks on all of them but nothing quite compares to Horses and Easter, the twin masterpieces of her career. She's a bit mad politically, but it kind of works for her - she wouldn't have produced any of her truly great works if she had been sane and well-balanced!

Here's another song I absolutely adore - from the album Wave. Excuse the pointless video!!

And this track is from Gone Again.

And finally, here's something I found on Youtube while searching for listenable versions of some of the songs - A duet with the Bobster himself!