Tom Waits - Bad As Me (Anti/Epitaph)
5/5
By: Thomas Hannan
The note accompanying a five star rating of Tom Waits’ last album on Amazon saying, simply, “If Tom Waits was going to make a bad album he would’ve done it by now” is one of my favourite pieces of music journalism. The fact that it was posted before said record, 2004’s Real Gone, was even released is testament to the unshakable faith Waits’ fans have in his ability to deliver the goods. He’s been all treat and no trick for the best part of thirty years now, and for a career with as many stylistic shifts as his, that’s quite the achievement.
It’s a remarkable purple patch that continues in to this, his nineteenth studio album. It’s not the result of Bad As Me representing another of those stylistic shifts - from drunken balladeer to circus ringleader to guy experimenting with ripping out his own throat - that have characterised his career, either. Bad As Me does the lot, and whilst it’s not the best Tom Waits album (it comes close enough), it probably is the most representative of him as an artist on the whole. And it’s the fact that it showcases every aspect of this man’s simultaneous reverence and disregard for the role of the singer songwriter that makes it such a delight.
Of course, it’s also been a while, and at first it’s just fucking brilliant to have new Waits songs in the world, almost whatever they sound like. So long has it been since some new studio material proper reared its head that the incessant brass parps, semi-percussive vocals and guitar lines that sound like they’re being wrung out of the neck on the opener ‘Chicago’ act like a hug from a scary, long lost friend. Like much here, it’s barely a couple of minutes long. But brevity has been key to much of his best work, and it’s a tactic that works here too. Across the record he’s revisiting methods used in parts of his career many thought long abandoned, but will be delighted to find are still formidable weapons in his arsenal. ‘Everybody’s Talking’ sees him employ a beautiful falsetto reminiscent of ‘Shore Leave’ from Swordfishtrombones, and the incorporation of ‘Auld Lange Syne’ on closing weepie ‘New Year’s Eve’ harks back to the heavy nods given to ‘Waltzing Matilda’ by ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’, the opening track from his first masterpiece Small Change.
Waits once wittily nullified criticism of a lot of his songs sounding the same by noting that his kids all look pretty similar too, and yet he still loves them equally. In this respect, ‘Kiss Me’ bears an extremely flattering similarity to a true Waits classic, ‘Blue Valentine’, and doesn’t suffer from the burden of the resemblance either. It’s gorgeous. And before you think that he’s put some cheesy vinyl sound effect underneath things in a hackneyed grope for authenticity in a digital age, take solace in the fact that those clicks and pops were actually generated by him recording the sound of some chicken frying on a barbecue. Now, picture what he looked like when putting that on tape.
Waits is a joker, and as such there are some moments that are more throwaway than others. But whilst something like ‘Let’s Get Lost’ is the type of song that he can probably be found mumbling in his sleep, it’s also the kind of number that nobody else around today is capable of delivering with the right mix of sincerity and humour. It might be slightly absentminded, something of a goof, but it’s still a total hoot (“Think about what you’re gonna tell your boss!” he advises, after spending the rest of the song offering you a tantalising invite to join him on a bender).
From the title track to the bewitching groove of ‘Raised Right Men’, the raucous stuff on the whole is so, so much fun. Yet perhaps I’m getting old, because despite the dazzling array of punishing percussion and Waits’ inimitable growls on show here, it’s the ballads that really lend Bad As Me its considerable weight. The middle third of the album ends with a dizzyingly impressive trio of the blighters – the desolate, distant travelling tune ‘Face To The Highway’, exiled lament of ‘Pay Me’ (“they pay me not to come home”) and second single ‘Back In The Crowd’, a proper tear jerker that would have the rest of the tracks on Bawlers (the disc of his recent odds and sods compilation Orphans that was reserved entirely for sad songs) reaching for their handkerchiefs / whisky / whisky-soaked handkerchiefs.
And yeah, Marc Ribot’s on it too! On all of the best bits! His astonishing stop-start-stop-start guitar lines are so idiosyncratically sputtering that they sound like the result of him frantically trying to strangle the notes out of the strings. His playing is easily more recognisable than that of the album’s other big guest, Keith Richards, but instead of the Rolling Stones legend’s guitar skills stealing the show, it’s actually a song featuring his vocals that gives us Bad As Me at its peak.
Actually, let’s take a minute to specifically focus on ‘Last Leaf’ and how it might be the most beautiful song ever. A duet between Waits and his Rolling Stone of a hero, it’s a number in which two old dudes take a melancholy look back on everything they’ve seen and what an effort it’s taken to survive it (“I’ve been here since Eisenhower and I’ve outlived even he – I’m the last leaf on the tree, the autumn took the rest, but they won’t take me...”). Waits has, of course, typically dismissed it as a song that is as matter of fact as its lyrics suggest – “it’s about a leaf!”, if he is to be believed. I don’t believe him. I choose to interpret it as an unusually sincere beauty of a track from a nineteenth album that would definitely make it on to any long-overdue career retrospective. And I can’t think of many other artists to whom that could apply.
Of course, given the nature of Bad As Me, we’re not allowed to wallow long, and the best ballad on the record is followed by its loudest, most confrontational turn in ‘Hell Broke Luce’. It’s a song about war that sure sounds like war, too. The few slightly uncomfortable lyrics it contains (I’ve never really wanted to hear Tom Waits say “polish up a turd”, and I’m still not sure I do) are quickly made up for by such bilious critiques of armed conflict as “how is it that the only ones responsible for this mess got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk?” which are pretty hard to argue with, no matter how straight down the line they are.
Any further reviewing of Bad As Me is an exercise in futility. Indeed, fun though it’s been to write, you only really needed to read and trust the first paragraph of the article – and I’m sorry for wasting your time. But it’s just true - if Tom Waits was going to make a bad record, he’d have done it by now. That applies not only to Bad As Me, but to whatever he chooses to do in the future. A true one-off, with whom we’re lucky to share a planet.
Tom Waits - Bad As Me by antirecords
Artists in this article: Tom Waits
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