***image1***TOM WAITS
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards
Anti Records
It's been a good year for musical titans returning from the stratosphere with their latest offerings. Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Cat Stevens and others have been productive…but not necessarily brilliant. Cry as you must, but let's face it, great talent will hardly yield lesser projects than the hoi polloi, but not all records from the avatars will be gems. As they say, bullshit may get you to the top, but it won't keep you there, so can the iconoclast league wiggle their way from under the weight of genius and monumental albums? The answer depends on two things: 1) Yes, if you happen to be Tom Waits and 2) if you resist duet albums.
Waits has the distinction of sounding like himself without being derivative of himself, and yet his most recognizable style introduced through
Swordfishtrombones
,
Frank's Wild Years
and
Rain Dogs
is unmistakable. Confused? Let's walk through it.
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards
is an apt title for the 54-plus-track triple album that pays no allegiances to established musical orders beyond the inherited bluesy DNA and Waits' pension for pot-clanging, whiskey ballads and gravelly barroom soliloquies that Bukowski fans will recognize and relish. The collection features 30 new tracks and inspired covers from various artists, including Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and Leadbelly. Songs recorded for various film projects that never went public combined with two hidden tracks and a 94-page booklet make
Orphans
the best 30 bucks you'll spend all year.
There's a wonderful moment in Terry Zwigoff's documentary
Crumb
when illustrator Robert Crumb is sketching an electrical transformer from his window and gently remarks (I'm paraphrasing here), "You can't make this stuff up." The mark of genius is recontextualization, shaping the materials that exist in the world into another sum and not depending on technology or abstract conceptualization to make the argument for you. Waits has built a 40-year career telling stories with remarkable character. Deathbed redemption, scallywag sailor tales, bull penises and single-malt euphemisms that you could swear pre-exist in tawdry lexicons comprise
Orphans
with the subtlety, nuance and artistry only Waits can deliver.
