Album Reviews

Patti Smith + Kevin Shields - The Coral Sea

In 2005 and 2006, Patti Smith paid homage to her late lover, the immensely talented artist Robert Mapplethorpe, in two transcendent performances at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. The beautiful double-disc set of these performances is an enraptured testimony to the life of Mapplethorpe. Smith’s two-hour-long readings of work from her 1997 book The Coral Sea is equally imbued with the pain of losing a loved one and the pride of honoring an irreplaceable icon. Kevin Shields, guitarist of My Bloody Valentine and inimitable Franz Kline of noise, created the sonic canvas onto which Smith’s story unfolds. With a cacophony of dissonance and groaning guitar, Shields unleashes an elegiac sound poem for the twenty-first century. Delicate, and then waxing tumultuous and heavy like the sea, Smith and Shields’s collaboration is an emotional monument to Mapplethorpe’s rise to prominence and fall to disease.

Pask

-Drew Tewksbury

Related posts:

1. No Age
2. Télépathique - Last Time on Earth
3. Abusing The Threshold: Turning the Screws of Los Angeles’ Experimental Noise Scene
4. Earthless/ Psychic Paramount
5. Concert Preview

© 2008 Drew Tewksbury: Multimedia Journalist.