Tom Waits [Album Covers]

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Album Covers : Tom Waits 28 Albums

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1973 Closing Time SR	1974 The Heart of Saturday Night SR	1975 Nighthawks at the Diner SR	1976 Small Change SR
1977 Foreign Affairs SR	1978 Blue Valentine SR	1980 Heartattack and Vine SR	1981 Bounced Checks R
1983 Swordfishtrombones SR	1984 Asylum Years S	1985 Rain Dogs SR	1987 Franks Wild Years SR
1991 The Early Years, Volume 1	1992 The Early Years, Volume 2	1992 Bone Machine SR	1993 The Black Rider SR
1997 Super Stars Best Collection: Tom Waits	1998 Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years SR	1999 Mule Variations SR	2001 Used Songs: 1973–1980 SR
2002 Were All Mad Here: A Conversation With Tom Waits	2002 Blood Money SR	2002 Alice SR	$[ 24 / 28 ] 2004 Real Gone On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound -- keyboards -- he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner Kathleen Brennan, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural blues, razor-cut rural folk music, and the rusty-edge poetry and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, bassist/guitarist Larry Taylor, bassist Les Claypool, and percussionists Brain and Casey Waits (Toms son), the latter of whom also doubles on turntables. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener, "Top of the Hill." Waits uses his growling, grunting vocal atop Ribots monotonously funky single-line riff and Caseys turntables to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics. Its a throwaway, and the album would have been better had it been left off entirely. But its also a canard, a sleight-of-hand strategy hes employed before. The jewels shine from the mud immediately after. The mutated swamp tango of "Hoist That Rag" has stuttered clangs and quakes for drums, decorated by distorted Latin power chords and riffs from Ribot, along with thundering deep bass from Claypool. On the ten-plus minute "Sins of My Father," Codys spooky banjo walks with Taylors low-strung bass and Waits shimmering reverbed guitar as he ominously croons, revealing a rigged game of "star-spangled glitter" where "justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig." Its part revelation, part East of Eden, and part backroom political culture framed by the eve of the apocalypse. Its hunted, hypnotic, and spooky.<br><br> In stripping away convention, Waits occasionally lets his songs go to extremes with absurd simplicity, such as on "Dont Go into That Barn," a musical cousin to his spoken "Whats He Building?" from Mule Variations. But theres also the downright riotous squall of "Shake It," which sounds like an insane carny barker jamming with R.L. Burnside, or the riotous raging blues of "Baby Gonna Leave Me." There are "straight" narratives such as "Hows It Gonna End," with its slow and brooding beat storyline, and the moving murder ballad "Dead and Lovely," with its drooping, shambolic elegance. Theres the spoken word "Circus," with its wispy spindly frame that features Waits on chamberlain. And "Metropolitan Glide" feels like a hell-bent duet between James Brown and Captain Beefhearts Magic Band, followed by the fractured, busted-love, ranting-at-God pain that rips through "Make It Rain." The tender "Green Grass" is among Waits finest broken love songs; its movingly rendered by a character who could have resided in one of William Kennedys novels. The set closes with "Day After Tomorrow," featured on MoveOn.orgs Future Soundtrack for America. It is one of the most insightful and understated antiwar songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation. Real Gone is another provocative moment for Waits, one that has problems, but then, all his records do. His excesses, however, do nothing to cloud the stellar achievements of his risk-taking vision and often brilliant execution.$ 2004 Real Gone SR
2006 Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards SR	2011 Bad as Me SR	2013 Anthology of Tom Waits S	2015 Transmission Impossible