CD Review: Tom Waits, Glitter and Doom Live

Tom Waits concerts are real events: phantasmic orgies of twisted, postmodern vaudeville and rag-and-bone blues. Unfortunately, his last world tour does not translate all that well to a strictly audio format.

Sans visuals — the weird, low-tech theatrics, Waits' demented carnival-barker stage persona — the music on Glitter and Doom Live comes off as strident and lacking in nuance.

The iconoclastic artist, closing in on 60, now sings almost exclusively in a low, guttural bark that would make a cranky Rottweiler blush with envy. And when Waits is not barking, he occasionally emits banshees shrieks that would cause that Rottweiler to hide under the bed.

All of this gets rather tiresome after awhile. And it makes me wonder what happened to Waits' other vocal gears: the whispery rasp, the craggy croon, the barroom moan. Those textures crop up occasionally in this 17-song set, but not enough.

This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...