There’s an unmistakable essence to Tom Waits of smoky cellar bars in the seedy part of town, either listening to some laid back jazz or wandering home in the rain-damp streets with a head full of mood. While many of the songs on here continue the sense first evoked on Nighthawks At The Diner, here he adds in a dimension of an absinthe-fuelled cabaret peopled by freaks and grotesques.
Gin-Soaked Boy is some straightforward John Lee Hooker style blues, while Down Down Down marries acoustic double bass with funky Hammond to give some laid-back and groovy jazz. Other tracks take this kind of jazz club vibe and add in some more experimental notes. Sixteen Shells From A Thirty Ought Six is fundamentally a blues track, but Waits growls his vocals over the top of an industrial beat punctuated by metallic percussion (presumably meant to evoke gunshots from the 30.06 caliber pistol of the title). Shore Leave is almost a spoken word piece recited over a mix of acoustic bass and exotic percussion, evoking images of East Asia with mention of “Singapore slings” and “Hong Kong rain” - a sailor on shore leave tries desperately to take pleasures in the two days he has available – gambling, drinking, whoring – while knowing that he is betraying the woman he has at home.
Dave The Butcher is a short instrumental, a piece of demented calliope music that is the sound of madness. Frank's Wild Year’s is a darkly comic spoken word piece over a simple beat about a man burning down his house (with, it’s implied, his wife and her mangy chihuahua inside). Throughout, Waits gives us a world of the numb, the broken, the desperate, and the just plain weird.
Of his albums so far, this was my favourite, one I’d probably listen to for its own sake as many of the tracks are really pretty solid, and the experimental ones are the right side of odd but not unlistenable. In his role as the curator of the unusual on this album, Waits demonstrates exactly why he was the perfect choice to play the character Mr Nick in Terry Gilliam’s Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus – a kind of purveyor of dark pleasures, pulling back the curtain on the Jungian Shadow of humanity.
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