Her first album in four years, "Trampin'," finds Patti Smith [ tickets ] no less eloquent than on her 1975 debut, "Horses." The elements are essentially the same: bare-bones, anthemic, folk-rock with razor-sharp, topical prose.

Smith's current band, which formed in 1996, features guitarist Oliver Ray, bassist/keyboardist Tony Shanahan, guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty; Kaye and Daugherty are holdovers from "Horses." Smith's daughter Jesse also provides piano accompaniment on the title track. Each musician serves the songs here, which is all that needs to be done.

Instrumentally, there are languid tunes like "Mother Rose" and "Trespasses," and more fierce cuts like "Stride of the Mind," but when you're a poet-rocker whose writings are frequently compared to those of Bob Dylan, you'd better listen to the words. And even though it's almost 30 years after the debut, the words are no less incendiary.

Take "Radio Baghdad": "You sent your lights / Your bombs / You sent them down on our city / Shock and awe / Like some crazy T.V. show / They're robbing the cradle of civilization.”

This is a record that deserves to be heard, and hopefully it won't be four years until the next one.