New Releases
Page 18 Date 21 October 2011 Circulation 182870
New Releases
reviewed by ANDY GILL
determination to resist the DOWNLOAD THIS Chicago; Satisfied; TOM WAITS corrosion of age: “I’ll be here Get Lost; Hell Broke Luce; Talking at The Same Time Bad As Me through eternity/ If you want to Anti- know how long/If they cut down PPPPP this tree/ I’ll turn up in a song”. It’s a lovely image, crooned over On what is inarguably Tom Waits’s pump organ, with Keith Richards best album since Rain Dogs a quarter an apt duettee. And most bizarrely of a century ago, he strolls assuredly of all, in “Hell Broke Luce” a across the landscape of American poor benighted draftee bemoans music, turning his hand with equal his life as a grunt, barking his facility to an extraordinary range of exasperation over a mutant march styles, and managing to invent one or of drilling soldiers, machine-guns, two of his own along the way. It must explosions, horns and mangled be wonderful to exercise such guitars that’s entirely sui generis. protean command over one’s art, It’s almost as if the classic Glenn and it’s immensely satisfying to Miller parade-ground swing had witness it wielded by a musician of been updated to something hellish such remorseless integrity. and acid-fried and supremely Right from the start, it’s hard to pissed-off: “I had a good home but keep up with the relentless pace I left, right, left/ That big fucking of Waits’s invention: “Chicago” bomb made me deaf, deaf”. barrels in on furious keyboard Waits also reaches a industry akin to a Reich or Adams rapprochement with the louche slice of train-themed minimalism, jazzbo style of his earlier records, somehow allied to honking R&B with the beautiful barroom drawl trombone, bass clarinet and of “Kiss Me”, the “Spanish bluesharp, and the spindly blues Harlem”-esque torch-song “Back guitars of Marc Ribot and Keith in the Crowd”, and the wistful Richards. Over in just a couple of blues-waltz “Pay Me”, with its minutes, it’s a dazzling, whirlwind cantina piano sounding like it evocation of the great emancipatory came straight out of Touch of migration from Mississippi to Evil. The more familiar R&B Chicago, and one of the greatest swagger is best effected on album openers you’ll ever hear. “Satisfied”, a riposte to the Stones’ The themes of migration, “Satisfaction”, which applies the dissatisfaction and desperation then gospel roll of a Sister Rosetta spread out across the album in all Tharpe rockin’ spiritual to kinds of ways. In “Get Lost”, a Waits’s antsy proclamation: “Now peculiar Tex-Mex garage-rockabilly Mr Jagger, Mr Richards, I will piece blessed with the beatific spirit scratch where I’ve been itching”. of Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, the And to give him his due, Keef protagonist has souped up his ride sounds far more engaged here in preparation for escape; in the than he did at the last Stones haunted walking blues “Face to the show I saw. But these are just a Highway”, Hidalgo and Ribot’s few of the highlights of an album guitars lend the appropriately which contains no filler at all, fatalistic air to an inveterate each track blooming in its own wanderer’s acknowledgement that way like a collection of strange the road is a stronger lure than love; desert succulents, with a whole and in “Last Leaf”, the allegorical lot of hollerin’ and a touch of leaf evokes an old-timer’s Lieber-Stollerin’.
The contents of the publications from which these extracts have been taken are copyright works and without prior permission of the relevant collecting society or save as permitted by statute may not be copied or otherwise reproduced (even for internal purposes) or resold.
Page 18 Date 21 October 2011 Circulation 182870
The contents of the publications from which these extracts have been taken are copyright works and without prior permission of the relevant collecting society or save as permitted by statute may not be copied or otherwise reproduced (even for internal purposes) or resold.