Tom Waits: Alice; Blood Money

By GRAHAM REID

Alice * * * * *

Blood Money * * *

Tom Waits' Mule Variations three years ago received an excellent critical reception, except in this column.

After wonderful oddities in the early and mid-90s, such as the clanking Bone Machine, the Night on Earth soundtrack and the brooding The Black Rider (music for a stage play by avant-garde director Robert Wilson), Mule Variations, good as it was - and this column said it was very good - still sounded like Waits-by-rote.

The ballads were immediately familiar, the quirky tracks seemed laboured, and all up it might have been a collection of reworked leftovers from the 80s.

But critics liked it and I concluded, because I had followed him through those less conventional albums, that I'd come to like Waits gloomy and more demanding.

When Waits turned left in the 80s (Swordfishtrombones) he began digging his own track, and I was digging it, too.

Given the diversity of Waits' career, it's fair you know where I come from. Right now I'm coming down from a cloud. Waits has released two albums simultaneously.

"Yeah, it's a bit of gimmick to kick'em out on the same day," he says. "How are they different? One's chicken. One's fish. But if you're going to turn the oven on you might as well make dinner."

Where Mule Variations retreaded his many previous styles in genre songs, on the better of these two releases the aching ballads rub shoulders with clank'n'grind percussion, and dissonant songs from some nightmare cabaret.

The discreet jazz references, mournful cello or accordion are assimilated throughout and can appear anywhere.

It doesn't make for easy listening at times, although there is still beauty in a broken spiderweb. And Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan write evocative images which suggest so much but overtly state so little.

And on Alice his affecting love songs are made even more engrossing by virtue of that rasping delivery.

Originally conceived as an opera (again produced by Wilson) Alice was performed in Hamburg in 94, around the time of Bone Machine and Night on Earth. But there are few direct reference points between the three, other than Waits' angular approach and intuitive feel for a simple, emotive melody.

Its theme is the relationship between Lewis Carroll and the little girl for whom he wrote Alice in Wonderland. That's difficult to discern - it was a play, you probably had to be there - but the tone of melancholy longing, unconsummated love and evocations of a dream world are scattered throughout.

In language which evinces a heartfelt response, and some gorgeous lines ("the air is wet with sound") Alice is mostly a melancholy and quiet album.

There's a jazz-noir feel in the elegant ballads, which include Flower's Grave ("someday the silver moon and I will go to Dreamland") and Poor Edward (possibly about Alice author Reverend Charles Dodgson and his alter-ego Carroll), which are among the most moving songs Waits has written.

I'm Still Here is an eloquent song of love and longing, one of the best he, perhaps anyone, has sung. It's a spare piano ballad of mystery and regret - "You haven't looked at me that way in years ... but I'm still here."

Alice is exceptional, and those who enjoyed either Mule Variations or Night on Earth could embrace it with absolute confidence.

Blood Money, a collaboration with Wilson, is darker, more direct but less rewarding. Based on the story Wozzeck (which Alban Berg turned into an opera of the same name in the 20s) it is about a soldier who slides into madness, murders his girlfriend after a perceived infidelity, then commits suicide.

This isn't necessarily as grim as it sounds: the opening songs (especially Coney Island Baby and All the World is Green) are love songs to Marie. But then with God's Away on Business ("I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby for a buck") the mood turns murderous.

By Waits' standards it's musically conventional, and suffers in the inevitable comparison with Alice.

If that weren't enough Waits for you, he contributes two new songs on the Big Bad Love soundtrack alongside T-Model Ford, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Tom Verlaine and others. Long Way Home is simple, country-styled ballad (Springsteen could cover it) and Jayne's Blue Wish is a brief, cracked 2am barroom lullaby.

So that's a lot of Tom Waits - but after listening to Alice you'll want to hear more of the man.

He has that rare gift of making those often threadbare emotions of love, longing and regret real again.

Label: Both Anti-Records/Shock