Okay, she's a poet and she knows it. But she's a transcendent poet and she has an ability to make her words soar. With its stripped down production, simple hypnotic guitar-based grooves, and improvised beatnik rants, Peace and Noise just might be the final blessing for a millenium gone awry.

Whether you like or hate Smith's harsh, pain-scarred voice is really beside the point -- you can't it ignore it. It is a life force in itself. Peace and Noise takes the listener through the decades, dirges capturing a century of youth in pain: ""The dead speak but we as a people have forgotten how to listen.""

In ""Waiting Underground,"" Smith sings of a Vietnam pilot whose soul is somehow sanctified by Patti and her crack team of musicians. In the desolate ""Last Call"" she laments a world that gave us the Heaven's Gate suicides. Michael Stipe echoes in the background and -- surprise! -- he doesn't even get in the way.

Timeless in a Neil Young sort of way, Patti uses acoustic guitars and warm distortions to evoke the ghosts of her dreams. More like prayers then songs, each of the tracks on this album embed themselves way deeper then anything you're gonna hear on the radio. Smith's elegant elegies inspire without preaching, her convictions and integrity so intense and real that if you turn off the album and turn on MTV you'll flush with embarrassment at the generation pretentiously preening in front of you.

Don't worry, unfortunately you'll get over it.