Patti Smith

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with "Gloria: In Excelsis Deo," a radical half-cover. The opening-line manifesto, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," was hers, but the climax was the chorus of Van Morrison's "Gloria."

So Smith's new covers album, Twelve, feels inevitable. The surprise is how unsurprising her renditions of rock classics are. Nothing gets amplified or made more aggressive. Her versions of quiet songs such as Neil Young's "Helpless" are faithful to the originals, while an attempt to bring back the joyous South African rhythms of Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble" with a dulcimer has mixed results. But when Smith slows down Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" the years of familiarity fall away, so the listener can rehear the "trumpets and violins . . . calling our names." Smith gets closest to a "Gloria"-like transformation with "Smells like Teen Spirit," following up the original lyrics with "Our Jargon Muffles the Drum," her poem about "exploited raging children of the mills" and "children of the junkyard malls," like a rock godmother mourning Cobain as a lost youth. A banjo player re-creates Nirvana's tormented riffs and ends with a rambling solo, communicating chaos like a squall of feedback.