This album feels like it’s Waits staggering home, half-drunk, from the jazz club in his previous album on the list, Nighthawks At The Diner. It’s got a sensibility like Sinatra’s Wee Small Hours, all late night/early morning melancholy and jadedness.
Waits growls and spits his way through some blues-jazz numbers full of Americana occupied by the strange and broken rogues gallery that you’d find in a Bob Dylan song - “Boney’s high on china white, Shorty found a punk, don’t you know there ain’t no devil, there’s just god when he’s drunk” from the title track Heartattack and Vine, for example.
Some are commentary on the state of the world, some are ballads (that, it has to be said, veer into the maudlin) about relationships. On The Nickel is a father’s advice to his son, loaded with lyrical references to nursery rhymes - “so ring around the rosie, you’re sleepin’ in the rain, and you’re always late for supper, and man you let me down again”. Jersey Girl is a love song, and although it was covered by Bruce Springsteen it already sounds like a Springsteen song, oddly enough.
Waits has a very distinctive voice, which for me worked better on Nighthawks than it does on here, perhaps because of the nature of the music. The album gets a very short entry on Wikipedia; about the only notable fact about it is that this is Waits’ last album for the record label Asylum, and its aggregated critic rating is middling, so it’s an odd inclusion, one where I’d probably need to read the actual 1001 Albums book to understand why this one, of all Waits’ albums, was chosen.
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