Most venerated artists get the urge to houseclean the vaults now and again, but few do it with as much ambition as Tom Waits on Orphans. The three-disc set is subdivided into discrete themes and includes 26 rarities and previously unreleased songs — as well as 30 new recordings.
Orphans breaks down like this: "Brawlers" (Disc 1), which captures Waits' roadhouse rock 'n' blues side; "Bawlers" (2), a compendium of ballads and "Bastards" (3), which indulges the artist's penchant for experimentalism and includes everything from wry spoken word to industrial crunch. The sprawling set is not as engaging as a single-disc Waits outing — there's a fair amount of fat here — but it is an impressive overview of the idiosyncratic artist's milieu. The organizational approach is actually something of a detriment: Part of the appeal of a Waits album is its willy-nilly element of surprise, where a slice-and-dice rocker might be followed by a tender torch tune; in Orphans' case, they're all grouped of a sort.
Besides Waits' singular postmodern take on blues, country, rock 'n' roll, gospel, folk and classic American balladry, Orphans includes sea shanties, tangos, tarantellas, strident Weill-esque popera, barroom singalongs and more. These fringe styles are best represented in "Bastards," the most exciting (and certainly most challenging and noisy) of the discs. It's also the funniest. "First Kiss" is a hilarious music-backed poem about a bizarre woman who "smelled like gasoline and root beer fizz" and didn't mind breaking in neighborhood lads with her lips. "Children's Story" is about as dark as bedtime tales get.
"Bawlers" is essentially a collection of love songs — some of them, but not all, quite conventional and sentimental, and most of them pretty, as far as pretty goes in Waits world. Most of these tunes are centered on upright piano to lend a hint of antiquity.
"Brawlers," while it certainly has its moments, is the least consistent of the discs. The opener "Lie to Me" is a disposable slice of warped rockabilly, but it's followed by a grinding slab of garage rock called "LowDown." At seven minutes-plus, "Road to Peace" is the biggest reach: The stomping blues is about Israel vs. the rest of the Middle East, its lyrics uncharacteristically didactic.
As expected, Orphans is populated with the usual menagerie of drifters, freaks, crooks, holy rollers, floozies and pervs. But we don't get very many lyrics that are quite as vivid as stuff from Swordfishtrombones, Raindogs or The Mule Variations. Waits' voice has many different gears — an offhand whisper, a weary croak, a rusty croon, a huge bellow, a fractured howl — and it's backed by sundry scrapyard orchestras made up of harmonicas, Dobros, accordions, pump organs, Salvation Army horns and just about anything else that was lying around.
Wildly uneven, and often just plain wild, Orphans is an apt career milestone for an American original. 3.5 stars
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2006.
