Musical mayhem from crazy uncle Tom Waits
Tom Waits 'Orphans' (3 discs, $49.98) Music: 4 Stars
Tom Waits is the weirdo uncle who'll pull out his glass eye on an unsuspecting nephew just to illustrate the horrors of the real world, and then, when the kid can't sleep, he'll rock him to bed with a lullaby. Eeriness and endearment are as synonymous with Waits as his soul patch and porkpie hat.
And on his new three-CD set, 'Orphans,' he sure-handedly excavates both ends of that spectrum and every divot in between, before welding, sawing and hammering the fragments into an intriguingly oddball collection of 30 new songs and 16 others consisting of redos, covers by the likes of the Ramones and Daniel Johnston, and interpretations of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski prose.
'Heavy' seems a wasted word when Waits writes (in the CD booklet): 'What's "Orphans"? I don't know. "Orphans" is a dead-end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.'
That pretty much sums up the lyrics. Verbose. Fantastical. Extreme.
But occasionally, Waits — in tandem with his songwriting partner, wife Kathleen Brennan — takes a break from the lyrical and musical mayhem of horns, farm-animal samples and pipes clanging against trash-can lid, for vignettes of unadulterated eloquence. Try 'Road to Peace,' a treatise on President Bush and Iraq that resonates despite Congress's fade from red to blue. Or 'Little Man,' in which Waits's old-school advice translates as hip when filtered through a rainy-day jazz arrangement.
For your convenience, 'Orphans' is divided into the ABCs of Waits: the drunken looney tunes of Brawlers, sepia-toned sad-sacking of Bawlers, and from-the-hip voice-overs of Bastards, a good many of which would have been better off neglected. No word yet on whether bombshell actress Scarlett Johansson will adopt any of these for her forthcoming Tom Waits cover album. — Michael Hoinski
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