Patti Smith — Banga (2012)

Patti Smith ♦ Banga

Release date: June 5, 2012 *
Tracks:
Disc 1 / Rating BBC: 4
01. Amerigo    (4:36)
02. April Fool    (3:46)
03. Fuji-san    (4:12)
04. This Is the Girl    (3:49)
05. Banga    (2:51)
06. Maria    (5:05)
07. Mosaic    (4:12)
08. Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)    (4:50)
09. Nine    (5:02)
10. Seneca    (5:39)
11. Constantine's Dream    (10:19)
12. After the Gold Rush    (4:13)
Album Credits:
Performance Credits:
◊ Patti Smith  Primary Artist, Vocals 
◊ Tom Verlaine  Guitar, Soloist 
◊ Jay Dee Daugherty  Drums, Mandocello 
◊ Lenny Kaye  Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Vocals 
◊ Jack Petruzzelli  Guitar, Vocals, Soloist, Hammond B3 
◊ Tony Shanahan  Bass, Keyboards, Vocals 
◊ Johnny Depp  Guitar, Drums 
◊ Louis Appel  Drums 
◊ Dave Eggar  Cello 
◊ Hiroko Taguchi  Viola 
◊ Jesse Smith  Piano 
◊ Maxim Moston  Violin 
◊ Jackson Smith  Guitar, Soloist 
◊ Entcho Todorov  Violin 
◊ Rob Morsberger  Piano, Conductor 
◊ Luca Lanzi  Acoustic Guitar 
◊ Fabrizio Morganti  Percussion 
◊ Tadhg Brady  Vocals 
◊ Sauro Lanzi  Accordion 
◊ Riccardo Dellocchio  Steel Guitar 
◊ Massimiliano Gregorio  Bass 
◊ Kobyn Payer  Vocals 
◊ Andreas Petermann  Violin 
◊ Clea Fynn  Vocals 

Technical Credits:
◊ Neil Young  Composer 
◊ Greg Calbi  Mastering 
◊ Jay Dee Daugherty  Composer, Producer 
◊ Lenny Kaye  Composer, Producer 
◊ Stewart Lerman  Composer, Engineer 
◊ Sun Ra  Composer 
◊ Tony Shanahan  Composer, Producer 
◊ Patti Smith  Composer, Producer 
◊ Andrea Rovacchi  Engineer 
◊ Iestyn Polson  Engineer 
◊ Emery Dobyns  Engineer 
◊ Rob Morsberger  Arranger 
◊ Rosemary Carroll  Representation 
◊ Ryan Gilligan  Pro-Tools 
◊ Eric Spring  Engineer 
◊ Dave Bett  Art Direction 
◊ Keenan Wyatt  Engineer 
◊ Kenny Kaye  Composer 

Newsletter & Description:
◊ The first single, “April Fool” (featuring Tom Verlaine), is available on iTunes now. The album was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York City and produced by Patti Smith and her band: Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daugherty and her long-time collaborator Lenny Kaye. Featured guests include Tom Verlaine, Jack Petruzzelli, Smith's son Jackson and daughter Jesse Paris.
◊ While supplies last, the Banga special edition CD is available for pre-order. This limited release includes hard cover book including 64 pages of original images, complete lyrics and liner notes plus the exclusive track “Just Kids”. Click here to pre-order now.
◊ Visit pattismith.net for an exclusive preview of the new song "Fuji-San" and the album’s title track, “Banga.” Patti collaborated with New York City-based photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist Steven Sebring (Sundance Film Festival award-winning film Patti Smith: Dream of Life) to tell the story of each song from the new album. Look for more clips from Banga coming soon.
◊ On Thursday, June 7, at 7.p.m, Patti Smith will be the featured guest on Barnes and Noble’s series “Upstairs at the Square”. Visit the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan (33 E. 17th St.) where Patti will discuss and perform songs from the new album.
◊ (*International release dates vary)
All Music Guide:
◊ Banga, Patti Smith's eleventh studio album, and her first in eight years, contains a dozen new tracks recorded with her longtime group of Lenny Kaye, Tony Shanahan, and Jay Dee Daugherty, along with guests Tom Verlaine, her children Jesse and Jackson, and Jack Petruzzelli. Among the album's selections are a ballad written in memory of Amy Winehouse ("This Is the Girl"), an exploratory, partly improvised jam about Amerigo Vespucci's journey to North America("Amerigo"), a birthday song for actor Johnny Depp ("Nine"), and a meditation on art and culture ("Constantine's Dream").
Product Details:
◊ Release Date: 6/5/2012
◊ UPC: 886972221724
◊ Label: Sony
◊ Catalog Number: 722217
◊ Sales rank: 194 Dave Simpson   guardian.co.uk, Thursday 31 May 2012 22.30 BST 
◊ Patti Smith has returned to the poetic-punk format of 1975's Horses, which the Polar prize committee recently described as "Rimbaud with amps". Four of Horses' personnel – Smith, guitarist Lenny Kaye, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty and Television' Tom Verlaine – are present here. It's a mixture of pop songs and poetic explorations, aided by the instantly resumed chemistry between Kaye's shimmering hooks and Smith's sensual vocals. While she has never sung better, the pop songs hit home first: the dreamy Amerigo, the reflective Maria and sublime April Fool, a headrushing tale of outlaw lovers who "race through alleyways in our tattered coats". The more esoteric monologues demand – and reward – perseverance, especially the 10-minute Constantine's Dream, a passionate defence of her other great love, art, complete with fantasy sequences set in the Garden of Eden. The collision of sound and language is exhilarating; if it is also occasionally impenetrable, that's down to her death-or-glory manifesto to "let me die on the back of adventure, with a brush".

Posted by Glen Boyd
◊ Remember when Patti Smith used to be considered dangerous?
◊ It’s a little hard to reconcile the one-time high priestess of punk rock — the same one responsible for such edgy slices of punk poetry, and the subject of Gilda Radner’s dead-on Saturday Night Live character Candi Slice in the seventies — with the modern day Patti Smith. Today, Patti Smith has settled quite comfortably into her current role, as kind of a torch-bearing, elder-statesman figure, proudly waving the twin flags of her updated brand of bohemian beat-poetry and a modern-day sort of rock and roll literacy.
◊ Patti Smith’s new album Banga may not deliver quite the same punk-rock snarl as her seventies classics Horses and Easter, but it is easily her best work since then. Like those amazing albums, Banga seamlessly places Smith’s spoken word, stream of consciousness poetry, within the more traditional context of three and four minute rock and roll song structures.
◊ Well, mostly anyway.
◊ On the sprawling, ten minute epic “Constantine’s Dream” — inspired by Piero della Francesca’s apocalyptic painting in the Basilica of St. Francis — Patti Smith weaves religious images of St. Francis and the angels, with visions of Constantine and his warrior conquistadors, all caught up together in some environmental apocalypse. Recited over a simple dirge-like musical backdrop that slowly builds to a wall of sound climax of discordant guitars and cacophonous noise, “Constantine’s Dream” is in many ways, the sort of wild, sonic freak-out that harkens back to her earlier ground-breaking tone-poems “Land,” “Birdland” and “Radio Ethiopia.” This is exactly the same wildly, improvisational sort of thing that gained Patti Smith her well-earned reputation as a great poetic voice that ultimately transcended the punk-rock medium she first got her start with.
◊ Interestingly, on this album Patti Smith follows the epic “Constantine” with a gorgeous cover of Neil Young’s “After The Gold Rush” — a song with considerable apocalypse imagery of its own. It’s a great choice, as the two differing visions of rock and roll prophecy form a perfect compliment to one another. This isn’t the first time Patti Smith has covered Neil Young, either. Her version of “Helpless” is one of the many highlights on her 2007 album, Twelve, which finds Patti Smith covering artists ranging from Young and Dylan, to Cobain and Hendrix. Here, the addition of a children’s choir on the chorus lends an eerily haunting quality to Young’s lyrics about a future environmental doomsday.
◊ Of course, any Patti Smith album worth its salt is going to contain lots of literary influences. In addition to “Constantine,” the opening “Amerigo” imagines what it might have been like if our country’s namesake Amerigo Vespucci made his voyage to discover America today. Likewise, the title track references the book, The Master and Marguerita by Mikel Bulgakov, and specifically a certain dog from the book (that’s Patti’s son Jackson you can hear making the dog yelps in the background). This song also features Johnny Depp playing guitar and drums. There is another song on Banga called “Nine” that Patti Smith wrote as a birthday gift to Depp. It is one of two songs on the album featuring a guitar solo from the great Tom Verlaine.
But not everything is a history lesson on Banga.
◊ On the beautiful, “This Is The Girl,” Patti Smith pays tribute to the tortured soul of Amy Winehouse (“a song we wish we never had to write” she says in the liner notes). “Just a dark smear masking the eyes, spirited away buried in sighs,” Patti sings about Winehouse, as Lenny Kaye and Jackson Smith create the sort of spooky sounding, last-call guitar sounds that recall David Lynch’s torchy Twin Peaks soundtrack, and it’s chanteuse Julee Cruise. “Fuji-San” offers up a prayer to the great mountain for the people of Japan following last year’s devastating earthquake. It is also one of the better rock tracks on this album, featuring stellar performances from Smith’s longtime collaborator Lenny Kaye and the rest of her band, and a great solo from Jack Petruzzelli.
◊ Like all of Patti Smith’s greatest work, Banga is an album that wears its literary influences on its sleeve, while weaving wildly between improvisational, avant-garde pieces like the Sun-Ra backed “Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter),” and more traditional fare like “This Is The Girl” and “April Fool.” Perhaps the biggest difference here though is Patti Smith’s voice. While her credentials as a great poet and writer have never really been in question, some have found Patti Smith’s vocals to be an acquired taste over the years. Banga is an album that finds Patti Smith to be a vocalist not only singing with more confidence than ever before, but also with surprising range.
◊ Banga may not carry quite the same snarl as Patti Smith did in her punk rock days on albums like Easter and her still unequaled debut masterpiece Horses. But this is easily her best record in many a moon. ◊

Patti Smith – Banga (2012)

 

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