Tom Waits - Disc of the day

Tom Waits
Mule Variations

(Epitaph, 1999)

The gruff one emerges from the shouty art ditch with a varied, heartfelt album that’s among his best.

Waits’s first album for nearly seven years was recorded for Epitaph – incongruously, the home of Offspring and Rancid – and put to tape in a converted chicken shed in Sebastopol, Northern California. It came complete with the whiff of myth that accompanies every Waits release and, surprisingly perhaps, reversed his trend towards ever filthier soundscapes and more sinister, impermeable poetry. So, the “clank, boom and steam” of 1992’s mortality-obsessed Bone Machine and the satanic polka of 1993’s Teuton operetta, The Black Rider, are on hold here, and the warmth and humour of Mule Variations’ songs are allowed to shine through their lo-fi blues skeletons. It’s varied fare, the mood swinging beautifully between the charmingly cranky and clattering (the opening Big In Japan, complete with “man kicking shit out of wardrobe” percussion effect) and the lusciously sentimental. Leadbelly is a touchstone; but so is Waits’s own Raindogs. Picture In A Frame is arguably his most knee-crumblingly blatant love song since that record’s Blind Love, while Get Behind The Mule’s fugitive travelogue and What’s He Building?’s nosey-neighbour monologue recall Gun Street Girl and 9th & Hennepin respectively. It’s full of fantastic conceits (why shouldn’t communion wafers be tastier?) and typically fine one-liners (“she’s a diamond that wants to stay coal”), but Waits can still move even better than he amuses. Georgia Lee, a contemporary murder ballad and the true story of a local latchkey child’s demise, sees Waits soften his pitchfork-tracheotomy voice to tackle the tender and hymnal refrain: “Why wasn’t God watching?/Why wasn’t God listening?/Why wasn’t God there?”. When he does, it’s as if the colourful-yet-gimmicky dramatis personae of Waits’s supposed ’80s peak – all those brilliantly sketched dwarves, gamblers, matelots and dipso rascals – fall away, and something simpler and truer and more lovely is once again revealed. Tom Waits gave up being Bruce Springsteen to be Captain Beefheart, with all the commercial costs that implies. God knows who he is now, but no-one sings the word “pistol” quite like him.

Danny Eccleston

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 25/07/2008