It's been seven years since Tom Waits released a stand-alone, no-themes-attached, no-filler-added album of all-new material.
It was worth the wait.
On Bad as Me — 16 songs, including three bonus tracks on the Deluxe Edition — the 61-year-old forever iconoclast sounds robust and rejuvenated, and is at turns cranky and romantic, introspective and in-your-face, sentimental and violent. While he still falls back on familiar melodic tropes — Tin Pan Alley, gutter blues, razor-edge rock, shanties, saloon ballads — none of the material sounds moldy. Waits gathered a stellar crew of old hands and pals (Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo, his son Casey on drums, Keith Richards on a few tunes), cut ’em loose and turned out a big, roomy sound with gobs of natural echo.
Along with guitar, bass and drums, the rhythm tracks stir in accordion, vibraphone, harmonica, pump organ, Wurlitzer, glockenspiel and, thankfully, lots of horns. Waits remains the man of a thousand voices: the brute bark, the lunatic yelp, the wistful whisper, the low grumble. It's a big improvement over his vocals of the 1990s, when for a while it seemed the best he could manage was a fractured croak.
Perhaps due to his songwriting collaboration with wife Kathleen Brennan (she co-wrote every song), Waits has for some time tempered the post-Beat verbosity of his lyrics. Yet Bad As Me still brims with vivid imagery, wacko characters, low-life narratives and clever phrases ("you need the patience of a glacier;" "everybody knows umbrellas cost more in the rain").
Let's examine a couple of extremes.
"Kiss Me:" In a rusty croon, over only the muscular pluckings of an acoustic bass and the plinks of a distant upright piano, Waits laments a relationship in bad need of a romance infusion: "Kiss me like a stranger once again / I want to believe that our love's a mystery / I want to believe our love's a sin."
"Hell Broke Luce:" The album's stunner, the song is built around a messy march beat with stuttering cadences; Waits acts as a deranged drill sergeant, spitting out invective. He is not often a topical songwriter, but "Hell Broke Luce" is a scathing indictment of the wars in the Middle East and a depiction of the carnage left behind. Guitars grind, percussion crushes, folks wail in the background and Waits spews:
While I was over here I never got to vote
I left my arm in my coat
My mom she died I never wrote
We sat by the fire and ate a goat
Just before he died he had a toke
Now I’m home and I’m blind
And I’m broke
What … is … next?
It's nice to know that Tom Waits, on his 20th studio album, can still concoct tunes that get us all fired up. And then turn around and break our hearts. (Out today on Anti-)
4 Stars
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2011.