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Bad as Me

  • Tom Waits
  • Anti-

"Maybe things will be better in Chicago," Tom Waits suggests on his ruggedly thoughtful new album, his growl near esophageal. Chicago, a hustling shuffle with a bass clarinet undertow, tells a story of migration – leaving a poor place behind for the rainbow's end up the road. These are blues, hopeful.

The Chicago-by-way-of-Mississippi bluesman Howlin' Wolf sang of spoonfuls – of diamonds, of gold, of precious love – and how some died over them, some cried over them, and everybody fought over them. Waits, 61, makes music about that fight; he's the blues artist that so many rockers desire to be. With his first album of all-new material in seven years, he's the man of this hard time, with humane, defiant observations on severe circumstances.

A ragman on a weird wagon, Waits with Bad as Me peddles some of the finest song-crafting of his long outlying career. The stoic Face to the Highway is the disc's sparest track, with lyrics about the need to move on set to a boot-clomp rhythm.

Waits is no crooner, you know that. But his range of singing styles here is an absolute plus, even if he does sound like a garbage disposal unit occasionally. On Pay Me, a waltzed soliloquy from an unapologetic actress in her final act, his rough murmur affects.

He uses a rare falsetto in Talking at the Same Time. Ice-cube piano notes tinkle, a guitar twangs languidly and an acoustic bass slithers along. Everybody has an opinion on the today's bad news, Waits included: "They've got the fruit, we've got the rind."

We are deprived of never hearing Amy Winehouse cover Kiss Me, a jazz ballad in black and white. Waits does fine. As for the balmy lonesomeness of Back in the Crowd, Roy Orbison might have sung it differently, but not better.

Familiar friends are in tow. All songs are co-written with wife Kathleen Brennan, as usual. The guitar stylings of Marc Ribot are economical and wonderful all over. And that's Keith Richards on the romping blues of Satisfied, which winks not only at Wolf's Smokestack Lightning but the wailing guitar of the Beatles' Yer Blues and the Rolling Stones too: "Now Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards, I will scratch where I've been itching." Richards, a past collaborator, harmonizes frailly on Last Leaf, a poignant take on being the final one to drop, melodically similar to a Doc Pomus pop hit for the Drifters.

It wouldn't surprise me if some Waits enthusiasts found this album less than adventurous (by Waitsian standards anyway). I would offer them the rap-metal war-protest monstrosity of Hell Broke Luce, and tell them to keep it.

The finale New Year's Eve, a border-town waltz with David Hidalgo on accordion, has a champagne chorale bit to it, Auld Lang Syne (sung, I swear, by Krusty the Klown).

New Year's Eve, of course, is ambiguous – an end and a beginning. Waits starts his relevant album with Chicago, but that city is no longer a sweet home for fresh starts. That place doesn't exist. Take haven instead in the blues of Bad As Me, a funky refuge in the age of apprehension.

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