CD Reviews of...
Tom Waits
Real Gone
By Debi Rotmil
The music of Tom Waits has always conjured images of whiskey soaked bars, lost loves, broken down carneys and hobo’s riding despair in the back of a box car. The heartbreak tone of rickety old guitars and foot stomping beat defines Wait’s legend. In his latest release, “Real Gone”, he ups the ante of musical originality. This album is a tour-de-force, easily placed alongside “Rain Dogs” and “Mule Variations” in Wait’s body of work. He sha-bangs and booms, barks and whoosh’s in the opener “Top of the Hill”, shuffling his weary feet toward patriotic cynicism in “Hoist That Rag”, while tripping the shaky light fantastic in “Metropolitan Slide”, an actual dance that goes way back to the days of prohibition. The sounds are raw, basic, kick drum, drunken guitar plunks molded into rumbas and slow dragging dirges, turning into a foot tapping, soul searching infectious sound. Even song titles have verve with “Clang, Boom, Steam” and “Chick a Boom”.
Yet, in tracks like “Don’t Go Into that Barn”, fear and paranoia prevail as he hides from an angry criminal roaming loose, drunk on “potato and tulip wine”. He takes on the guise of a soldier, defiant against patriotism, running from the obligations and expectations of ancestry in “Sins of Our Fathers”. Here Waits croons with a sober voice, buoyed with a creepy beat, “Carving out a future with a gun and an axe/I'm way beyond the gavel and the laws of man/ Still living in the palm of the grace of your hand”. During this time of war, rife with patriotic intension, this lyric is stark and biting. Kathleen Brennan, Waits’ longtime collaborator and wife, contributes wonderfully as his muse, making him go the distance, beyond the boundaries he even surpassed in his previous work. His children even help out in a family effort with background ambiance and turntable scratches. You can smell the sawdust and imagine the dank underground room in which he devised this work. In the slinky verbiage of our great scat masters and bluesmen, it’s safe to say that “Real Gone” is real gone, baby.