Tom Waits

Tom Waits
Glitter & Doom Live
Anti-
Rating: 3/5

In his earlier years, all Tom Waits needed to animate a live show was a piano and a standard lamp. Since then, the balance has shifted significantly, to the point where Waits comes armed with a small ensemble of players able to accommodate the variety of instrumental colouration in his songs, while the lyrics have to some extent retreated into a netherworld of nursery rhymes and familiar folksong phraseology. But, perhaps anxious that he might be verbally short-changing his audiences, Waits has vastly expanded his song introductions into such a flood of patter that for this record of last year's Glitter & Doom tour, they're accorded their own separate CD, which plays like a surreal stand-up routine. Except that it's not all that funny, the singer profiting from the tendency of audiences to respond over-generously to any slightly amusing onstage remark a musician might vouchsafe. Musically, however, there's no denying he has developed a peculiar genius entirely his own. It's there in the way that the occasional bell tolls over brooding bass clarinet and astringent guitar, affirming the graveyard sentiment of 'Dirt in the Ground'; in the whiskery boho-blues shuffle 'Get Behind the Mule', which, stung with guitar and burnished with horns, seems to get funkier as it proceeds; and in the way that Spanish guitar and clarinet waltz with some weird keyboard in 'The Part You Throw Away'. Unbearably poignant, for the most part.

Download: 'Singapore', 'Get Behind the Mule', 'Trampled Rose'