jo-rosie haffenden #1
Tom Waits' Orphans has me compelled and obsessed once again with music from roots level and below. His syrupy slur and melodramatic, at times brash fanfare of kitchenware percussion from the outset appears to be like a library of Geoffrey Chaucer - with complex levels of ostentatious sounds an obstacle course of intricate emotions - open, daring and at times scary. But give it time.
The silicon-like surface shone sterile and the clocks noise dripped like Chinese water torture. Time would persist diligently like some misused lover returning unwanted again and again. The blank screen of the computer bounded light intensely into my eyes as I fell back into his world unable to begin to think about my album of 2007 when this album of late 2006 still had me utterly transfixed.
Tom Wait's 3 disc set has not been so much of a distraction away from thinking about what was my album of 2007, as a stance from which to see music released this year differently. A pair of 3-D glasses for the first time, tinting, transforming your senses. You melt into his intrepid Burton-esque world of 3 fingered gamblers with names like Blackjack Ruby, and ladies who fall in love with whales. The discs sit like dusty old rope, immense with tales threading together just about every genre we have categorised and many we have not.
After listening to this avant-garde, beautiful, harrowing contradiction which sows passing opposite genres together in a seamless revelatory epic, you can't go back. It becomes imperative to see the linking parents of these orphan genres which seem to have been separated and isolated through genre categorisation. Nothing is the same. Richard Hell's influence of The Future Heads and Dylan's influence on...well just about everything in our current indie-retro scene - punches your arm unashamed and unabashed - and in turn Willie Nelson's explicit influence on Dylan and Chuck Berry's influence on the music of Richard Hell beats you black and blue... You see that everything is a version of a version of something once authentic and magical a long, long time ago.
It has compelled me to listen to every sound and every lyric differently. When the greats came out this year - Kings of Leon, Arcade Fire, The National - suddenly I entered them with more intensity. I realised that an album is someone else's world, and to truly appreciate it, you need to fall head first into the fire of lyrics and drown in levels of influences and times.
Thanks to Orphans, I listen to music as a whole now, listen for the origin of the sound, from the caveman's tapping of a rock to the cotton field chants to Jazz. Tom's all at once atavistic and contemporary circus of boo-bams, spoons, swing, blues and foxtrots, home to the poor boy left at the end of the world on his own and the necrophiliac praying mantis that takes me back and forward like a yo-yo and into a musical cave I hope never to return from.
There is a scene at the beginning of the film Contact (a sci-fi with Jodie Foster) when the camera pans in from seeing lots of galaxies to ours, then from all those universes in the galaxy to our little one, then to our little planet then to America and smaller still to the character's house, then into her eye then inside into the little blood cells in her body. This is what Orphans has done for me for music, and this is why it is my album of 2007 even though it is in fact from 2006.
Stream three tracks from 'Orphans' HERE.