Tom Waits: Real Gone

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * * )

A cursory listen to this new collection from the dark side and you might be inclined, as this fool was, to quickly dismiss it as too much of the familiar clank'n'grind sonics with Tom's easily parodied rumbling bucket-bottom vocals growling over the top. After the superb Alice and only marginally less terrific Blood Money of two years ago, Real Gone can sound disappointing. Those who tuned in for his million-selling Mule Variations a couple of years before will be mystified because this is closer to his disturbing and difficult Bone Machine of over a decade ago.

Just a couple of listens, however, and the nuances come out, the depth of his disturbed vision becomes clear, and the individual songs start to grip.

Waits doesn't let you in easy, however. The long grinding opener with a scattering of turntable scratching from son Casey and a repeated guitar figure is a bluesy cruncher with the hook "get me on the ride up". It is typically impenetrable: "Opium, fireworks, vodka and meat, scoot over and save me a seat."

The second track Hoist That Rag is where things get going, it's based around guitarist Marc Ribot's stuttering Cuban-style playing and is a dark sea shanty-like meditation on life and death ("God used me as a hammer boys to beat his weary drum today").

And after this the album lives up to its title: the music scours the bottom of the lake for rusty bicycles and bodies dumped there, Waits takes a reggae structure on an epic journey down to the pond to wash away the Sins of the Father, is out in a low-rent motel for the seedy blues of Shake It, and tells a typically menacing story on Don't Go Into That Barn.

There is also haunting beauty here: the snakelike uneasiness of How's It Going To End; the sympathetic Dead and Lovely about a middle-class girl who thought she could stand in the deep end; and especially the final track Day After Tomorrow in which he returns to a stylistic device he used three decades ago in a weary letter from a soldier "not fighting for justice/not fighting for freedom/fighting for my life". It asks, "If they pray to the same God, how does God choose from all the prayers he hears?" Waits has seldom sounded so current in his concerns.

But mostly this is music suffused in noir-blues and ancient folk narratives, and during its 70 minutes explores some of the most fearful and fragile aspects of being human. Of being a bone machine.

Label: Shock