Tom Waits

I have a bias for music with melody. “Music” that is made to be intentionally experimental often leaves me cold…and scratching my head. Why would Tom Waits, who could make songs as beautiful as “Please Call Me Baby” (from 1974’s The Heart of Saturday Night) and “Downtown Train” (from 1985’s Rain Dogs) not want to make more of it? He’s completely dropped all sentimental and melodic sensibilities from his arsenal (and all traces of piano, as well). But that’s beside the point. Just because I miss his old bluesy, boozey, sentimental side, doesn’t mean he should try to please someone like me.

On the appropriately titled Real Gone, Waits seems to have fully morphed into a back-alley version of Oscar the Grouch – sucking on a bottle of Old Crow and chewin’ on a cheap stogie, while banging together garbage can lids and pontificating on his life in the trash. Frankly, it’s often frightening…but never entirely unlistenable, although the ten-minute “Sins of My Father” is particularly rough to trudge through. But you can always rely on Waits for wonderfully bitter and quotable lyrics -- on “Make It Rain,” Tom snarls “I’m not able, I’m just Cain.”

Waits is always interesting. I don’t think that’s even up for debate. But I feel like Real Gone is just another version of one of his prior experiments with sound (the one featured to greatest effect on 1992's Bone Machine), just served up in a different ashtray. He’s the only who does what he does…and he’s good at being Tom Waits. You have to respect an artist that tries to keep his art fresh and interesting for himself. I just don’t know who would listen to this album more than once. - Doug Kamin

On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound -- keyboards -- he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner Kathleen Brennan, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural blues, razor-cut rural folk music, and the rusty-edge poetry and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, bassist/guitarist Larry Taylor, bassist Les Claypool, and percussionists Brain and Casey Waits (Tom's son), the latter of whom also doubles on turntables. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener, "Top of the Hill." Waits uses his growling, grunting vocal atop Ribot's monotonously funky single-line riff and Casey's turntables to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics. It's a throwaway, and the album would have been better had it been left off entirely. But it's also a canard, a sleight-of-hand strategy he's employed before. The jewels shine from the mud immediately after. The mutated swamp tango of "Hoist That Rag" has stuttered clangs and quakes for drums, decorated by distorted Latin power chords and riffs from Ribot, along with thundering deep bass from Claypool. On the ten-plus minute "Sins of My Father," Cody's spooky banjo walks with Taylor's low-strung bass and Waits' shimmering reverbed guitar as he ominously croons, revealing a rigged game of "star-spangled glitter" where "justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig." It's part revelation, part -East of Eden, and part backroom political culture framed by the eve of the apocalypse. It's hunted, hypnotic, and spooky.

In stripping away convention, Waits occasionally lets his songs go to extremes with absurd simplicity, such as on "Don't Go into That Barn," a musical cousin to his spoken "What's He Building?" from Mule Variations. But there's also the downright riotous squall of "Shake It," which sounds like an insane carny barker jamming with R.L. Burnside, or the riotous raging blues of "Baby Gonna Leave Me." There are "straight" narratives such as "How's It Gonna End," with its slow and brooding beat storyline, and the moving murder ballad "Dead and Lovely," with its drooping, shambolic elegance. There's the spoken word "Circus," with its wispy spindly frame that features Waits on chamberlain. And "Metropolitan Glide" feels like a hell-bent duet between James Brown and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, followed by the fractured, busted-love, ranting-at-God pain that rips through "Make It Rain." The tender "Green Grass" is among Waits' finest broken love songs; it's movingly rendered by a character who could have resided in one of William Kennedy's novels. The set closes with "Day After Tomorrow," featured on MoveOn.org's Future Soundtrack for America. It is one of the most insightful and understated antiwar songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation. Real Gone is another provocative moment for Waits, one that has problems, but then, all his records do. His excesses, however, do nothing to cloud the stellar achievements of his risk-taking vision and often brilliant execution. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide