Album: Patti Smith

Twelve is Patti Smith's covers album. There was a time, back before Dylan and The Beatles, when every album was effectively a covers album, the demarcation lines between songwriter and performer being rather more rigorously policed than in later years. Singers weren't ashamed at singing other people's songs, as came to be the case in the Seventies, when lack of compositional skill tarred many a vocalist as mere cabaret turn.

That situation sustains so strongly today that the release of a covers album - unless dedicated to a single writer's work, like Bryan Ferry's recent Dylanesque anthology - is heralded as offering some fascinating insight into the performer's psyche. As if that were any reason to listen to music! We are meant to be intrigued when an artist chooses to perform a song contrary to their usual style, and some singers make deliberately quixotic track selections for that very reason.

For a boho poetess and renegade noisenik like Patti Smith to intrigue or shock, she would probably have to be delivering an album of Carpenters covers, or hymns.The closest she comes to shocking is the otherwise unexceptional version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" that interrupts her mostly Sixties/Seventies track-listing, an aberration swiftly dismissed by songs such as the sinister "White Rabbit" and a "Gimme Shelter" stuffed with some raunchy slide-guitar by The Black Crowes' Rich Robinson.

Some tracks don't quite come off: the collective foot is too heavy on the poignancy pedal for a reading of Neil Young's "Helpless"; "Within You Without You" is slightly laboured; and "Changing of the Guard" involves the ho-hum arrangement of a ho-hum Dylan song from his least productive period. But the bluegrass version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is great. Best of all is the languid "Are You Experienced?" that opens the album, uncoiling like a lazy snake as the bluesy backing gives way to Arabic-tinged clarinet and droning strings.

Most of the tracks, though, occupy a grey area where grudging appreciation is too readily supplanted by cavernous indifference. And as for the likes of "Soul Kitchen", "Midnight Rider" and "Boy in the Bubble", there's little to be gained in terms of either music or psychological insight from studying them too closely. They're cultural references shared with too many others to offer a more particular meaning in Patti's case; how much more fruitful it might have been if she had opted to explore a few of the smaller stones on her personal musical landscape, rather than these colossal boulders.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Are You Experienced?', 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', 'Gimme Shelter'