The rumbunctious folk collective Bellowhead used to perfom a track arranged from a traditional German folk song called Spectre Review, about an army of dead soldiers risen from the grave – the pieces on this album are what you might imagine an undead army marching to, especially Singapore and the appropriately-named Cemetary Polka.
The sense of a danse macabre pervades the album - Tango ‘Til They’re Sore has a bit of New Orleans funereal jazz to it. I called Swordfishtrombones an “absinthe-fuelled cabaret of freaks and grotesques” but once the image stuck, I can help but think of this one as the soundtrack of lurching zombies and skeletons, ghosts and ghouls, with Waits as a Baron Samedi figure conducting his army of undead musicians.
This impression is somewhat taken away by tracks Hang Down Your Head, which is a very mainstream bit of country rock, certainly one of the easiest listening on the album but also rather disappointingly mundane compared to the other tracks – a bit like seeing a goth in a suit, it just doesn’t feel right.
Gun Street Girl mixes banjo with industrial percussion with some dark blues and reminded me of If It Hadn’t Been For Love by The Steeldrivers, possibly because it mentions Birmingham (Alabama) as well as the growled delivery. Keith Richards pops up on guitar on the second half of the album – there's somebody we haven’t heard in a long time, on the quite Stones-like blues-rock track Union Square and the quite Stones-like country-rock track Blind Love. And, in fact, the bulk of Side Two is more mundane than Side One. Downtown Train sounds like it could be a Springsteen song about unrequited love, and you may recognise the chorus of “Will I see you tonight, on the downtown train?”. The track has been covered by the likes of Bob Seger and Rod Stewart and is, at a guess, Waits’ most commercial sounding song.
The album does return to some of the stranger music towards the end, but overall it really does feel like a game of two halves. At the beginning I was thinking that this felt like a progression from Swordfishtrombones, taking the chaotic music of that album and honing it to a more developed form, so for me it was a bit disappointing with the more straightforward tracks on Side Two. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with them (assuming you can handle Wait’s very distinctive voice, kind of how you’d imagine a bourbon-drinking grizzly bear to sound) but he’s capable of much more inventive work.
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