It’s part of Tom Waits’ charm that he begins each of his albums sounding as though he’s just been dug out of the earth. Sometimes he arrives with the croak of the undead, a German expressionist woodcut come to reluctant life. At other times, there’s a weird exuberance, a comeback that’s both cantankerous and joyous.
“Real Gone”, happily, fits the second model. But Waits’ reawakening on this, his 18th album, is startling even by his standards. “Top Of The Hill” opens with Waits turning himself into a human beatbox: not, of course, a precision machine like Rahzel, but a wheezing and malfunctioning piece of junkyard soldering. With his son Casey scratch DJ-ing in the background, you’d be forgiven for thinking Waits had chosen to court fashion, been consumed by that deadly anxiety to be contemporary that afflicts certain middle-aged rock stars.
But his appropriation of hip-hop skills sounds swampy and ancient, the perfect accompaniment to his crotchety, compelling and utterly unique music. Unlike the rather gruelling pair of albums he released in 2002, “Alice” and “Blood Money”, "Real Gone" is a kind of party album. On “Metropolitan Glide”, he even starts his own dance craze, exhorting the brave to, “Whip the air like a rainbow trout”.
Waits calls the music here “cubist funk”, and although you can see his point, Afro-Cuban and Caribbean influences also sidle their way into the mix. There’s a dusty exotica to many of these songs, as the brilliant Marc Ribot plays a scything mambo guitar break on “Hoist That Rag”, or “Sins Of The Father” slopes along in a rickety approximation of reggae. While Waits is restricted by the barking timbre of his own voice, the peculiarly arcane way he hears music, it’s clear that he’s trying to subvert his own stereotype on “Real Gone”. No piano appears anywhere on the album, even on the classically Waitsian anti-war ballad, “Day After Tomorrow”, which brings this enjoyable album to a close.
Occasionally, he veers towards self-parody: “Circus”, especially, wheels out Waits’ best selection of carny freaks, all Koolaid cocktails and homemade tattoo guns. Nevertheless, his depictions of American Grotesque are always entertaining, at the very least, and this time he uses his Biblical grasp of parable to comment on the venality of the Bush administration and the idiocy of their wars. “I’m not fighting for justice, I am not fighting for freedom,” laments Waits in “Day After Tomorrow”, casting himself as a GI stuck, bewildered, in Iraq. “I am fighting for my life and another day in the world here.”
Reliably odd, then, but unexpectedly moving, too: the best Tom Waits album, all told, since 1992’s “Bone Machine”.
