Tom Waits: "Hell Broke Luce"

Ever wonder what Lulu would have been like if either Lou or Metallica had anything left in the tank? "Hell Broke Luce" presents a more interesting concept: what if Tom Waits replaced Nick Cave in the Bad Seeds, if only for one song? Waits is the anti-Reed, still full of piss and vinegar, never full of himself.

Tom Waits: "Back in the Crowd"

I feel like I've been posting a lot of Tom Waits lately, but the recent Throwback was done before I even realized he had a new record on the horizon.  I wasn't entirely sold on the first new single, "Bad As Me", but "Back in the Crowd" eschews the labored quirkiness of that song for a more straight forward, Spanish-inflected ballad sound.  It's a little brief at 2:50 but the two singles combine to reassure that Bad as Me, the album, will be the diverse collection we're used to expecting out of Waits.  If one song isn't your bag, the next one probably will be... and as a whole the man tends to bat well over .500.

Tom Waits: "Bad As Me"

Well, look who's back?  Excluding the odds & ends collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards it's been nearly seven years since Waits' last studio album of newly written material.  I don't know quite what I think of "Bad As Me" after a couple of cursory listens:  it's got a good sound to it and the hammy singing style I've long since gotten used to, but that's kind of just it... this doesn't really distinguish itself much from the same style he's been milking for over ten years now.  Maybe it will be one of those slow gestating songs that end up being one of my favorites, but in the meantime my gut tells me that I hope he chose this as the first single off the new album because it was the most accessible, and not the most adventurous.

  Tom Waits - Bad As Me by antirecords

THROWBACK 1999 || Tom Waits: "Hold On"

Alright, July being a month filled with vapid summertime releases that I have no interest in covering here - to wit, new LPs by 311, Incubus, 3 Doors Down and Sublime - it seems as good a time as any to kick off the Throwback series. Since the aforementioned new releases might already lead one to believe we're still living at the turn of the millennium, let's go with something from 1999.

1999 was kind of a transitional year. Nearly all the commercially successful grunge and alt rock bands that ruled the decade had either imploded - Soundgarden, Faith No More, Gin Blossoms, White Zombie - or had taken a nose dive in album sales... Stone Temple Pilots, Collective Soul, Bush, Third Eye Blind, etc.

On the other hand, 1999 was the Year of Napster; many youth who would ordinarily have been fussing over the Next Big Thing were instead fleshing out their existing discographies, downloading old stuff that they'd never got around to buying and just generally catching up on the classics. Yep, it was the era of compilations and greatest hits records, the remix collection and the covers album... a period in flux that the record business never really recovered from.