Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [48]
Horses really defines itself in “Kimberly” “Land,” and “Elegie,” the latter two fitting together in one shattering epic of violence, flight, death, and mourning that is ultimately purgative. “Kimberly” is the most haunting song I’ve heard in a long time (enough so that by the time I’d had the record 48 hours it was pulsating straight through not only my days but my dreams at night), a sort of Ronettes bolero cum “Waiting for the Man” celebrating the act of giving birth as cataclysm (as it is) in stunning lyrics: “Oh baby I remember when you were born/It was dawn and the storm settled in my belly/And I rolled in the grass and I spit out the gas/And I lit a match and the void went flash/ And the sky split/And the planets hit…. And existence stopped/Little sister, the sky is falling/I don’t mind….”
“Land” establishes an eerily malevolent sexuality in the opening build leading to the rape scene, then the wild surge, each word an explosion, of “Suddenly/Johnny/gets a feeling/ he's being surrounded by/ horses!/horses!/horses!/horses!” and then into a raw, tearing chorus of “Do you know how to pony” from the old Chris Kenner hit “Land of a Thousand Dances.” After that the song takes off almost literally into space, Patti's three vocal tracks weaving in and out of phase, merging splintered images as if by magic: “He picked up the blade and then he pressed it against his … smooth throat/and let it dip in/the veins/to the sea/of possibilities/it started hardening/to the sea/in my hand/ and I felt the arrows of desire….” all rising in one raging floodgate of sound and image to explode in choking death chillingly envisaged, life ebbing with one decelerating drumbeat to “Elegie,” a gust of pure melancholy stilled just short of whole anguish in Patti's finest vocal and the loneliest piece of music since Nico's “Elegy to Lenny Bruce.”
Patti's heroes may be gone, but she is both with us and for us, so strongly that her music is something, finally, to rally around. For one thing, she has certain qualities that can make her a hero to a whole generation of young girls; Patti has done more here for woman as aggressor than all the Liberation tracts published, and has pushed to the front of the media eye that it is just as much a process (ordeal) of learning to “become” a “woman” as it is for men wrestling with all this ballyhooed “manhood” business. It's this tough chick who walks like Bo Diddley and yet is all woman like we’ve been waiting for so long, a badass who pulls off the feat of being simultaneously idol of women and lust object of men (and women, no doubt).
And even more than that, Patti's music in its ultimate moments touches deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching. With her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, or the Dylan of “Sad Eyed Lady” and Royal Albert Hall. It's that deeply felt, and that moving; a new Romanticism built upon the universal language of rock ‘n’ roll, an affirmation of life so total that, even in the graphic recognition of death, it sweeps your breath away. And only born gamblers take that chance.
Creem, February 1976
Better Than the Beatles
(And DNA, Too)
Ihave been getting whiny letters from a lot of you complaining about the general state of the art. “What is all this shit?” you ask. “We thought New Wave was supposed to be this awakening of New Avenues of Self Expression and Freedom, resulting in new musical verities