Real gone, by Tom Waits
by Ian Simmons
[ cdreviews ]
Having spent most of the Nineties "stuck in traffic", or so he once claimed, Tom Waits has greeted the new century with a furious burst of creativity, with four albums in as many years. While Mule Variations seemed like a treading of water, a recapitulation of familiar Waits tropes, perhaps a flexing of neglected muscles after a long lay-off, a way of remembering the way it is done before moving forward, and the simultaneously released Alice and Blood Money a return to more conventional piano-based song, Real Gone goes somewhere else. Gone are the German cabaret inflections of Alice and an element of the jagged bleakness of Black Rider has returned. Also back is Wait's obsession with signal degradation; the entire album sounds as if it was recorded on a cheap tape recorder 20 years ago, pressed on Jamaican vinyl from the Seventies (the recycled stuff in which you would sometimes find the remains of the previous label) and then left in the sun for six months - but in a good way. The result is a grainy, echoing atmospheric soup of evocative, atmospheric rumble and scrape, perfectly complementing Waits' extraordinary voice and subject matter. Indeed, his voice seems to get deeper and hoarser with every outing, so that he's beginning to sound like he's necked a belt-sander with the motor still running and is hitting notes so low that elephants will soon be picking them up with their feet. There is less in the way of bizarre instrumentation on Real Gone but there are new directions instead. Several tracks feature Waits' own vocal percussion and a couple have his son guesting on turntables, about the closest he's likely to get to hip hop. Waits' relish for bizarre characters hasn't abated, though. All present and correct are Horse Face Ethel and her Marvellous Pigs in Satin, Yodeling Elaine the Queen of the Air, one eyed Myra, Knocky Parker, Bowlegged Sal, Zuzu Bolin and the rest. There are also sinister barns, soldiers writing sad letters home, circuses, death, despair and heartbreak - in other words, everything you'd expect from a Tom Waits album. Musically, his palette ranges from Beefheart to Hoagy Carmichael, gospel, blues and Americana. Waits has staked out a unique territory for himself as the poet laureate of the American rural underbelly, the kind of countryside where the Tod Browning's Freaks still tour in their caravans and Leatherface might just be your neighbour. While this album might not have such classic tunes as Raindogs, say, it still has many moments of rare beauty, but off-beat enough that there's no chance of Rod Stewart massacring any of these songs. It may not be an album that brings Waits many new fans, but it will definitely keep longstanding ones very happy indeed.
