02 N o.
Tom Waits Bad As Me Anti-
When Tom Waits shouts “all
aboard” at the top of his 17th studio album, he is, of course, prodding listeners to board his mystery train of clotted rock ‘n’ roll, sloppy tango, Depression glassy blues, wistful accordion-pumped sea shanties and angled oddly Beefheart-ish punk. You want a bumpy ride. You get it.
The 61-year-old Waits has been doing this kind-of murky mess for a minute, turning to bent blues (1980’s Heartattack And Vine) and cranky cabaret (1983’s Swordfishtrombones) after dropping the drunk-y L.A. hotel-lounge bit he cultivated in the ’70s. Now, it’s not that he reinvents the wheel every time
out. He’s not preciously intellectual. Rather, Waits is a hands-on technician; he rips the tires off the car and burns the rubber down. That’s what the customer wants, after all. What makes each Waits recording more innovative than the last is how the howler and wife Kathleen Brennan—his
compositional co-creator and co-producer—find the wretched and the romantic in the deepest recessed nuances: of slippery melodies made powerfully blunt in their brevity and of audacious lyrics filled with darkly battered characters seeking sunlight. The customer is always right. —A.D. Amorosi
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