On
Real Gone
,
Tom Waits
walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound -- keyboards -- he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner
Kathleen Brennan
, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural
blues
, razor-cut rural
folk
music, and the rusty-edge
poetry
and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists
Marc Ribot
and
Harry Cody
, bassist/guitarist
Larry Taylor
, bassist
Les Claypool
, and percussionists
Brain
Casey Waits
(
Tom
's son), the latter of whom also doubles on
turntables
. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener,
"Top of the Hill."
Waits
uses his growling, grunting vocal atop
Ribot
's monotonously funky single-line riff and
Casey
's
to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics. It's a throwaway, and the album would have been better had it been left off entirely. But it's also a canard, a sleight-of-hand strategy he's employed before. The jewels shine from the mud immediately after. The mutated swamp
tango
of
"Hoist That Rag"
has stuttered clangs and quakes for drums, decorated by distorted
Latin
power chords and riffs from
, along with thundering deep bass from
Claypool
. On the ten-plus minute
"Sins of My Father,"
Cody
's spooky banjo walks with
Taylor
's low-strung bass and
' shimmering reverbed guitar as he ominously croons, revealing a rigged game of "star-spangled glitter" where "justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig." It's part revelation, part
East of Eden
, and part backroom political culture framed by the eve of the apocalypse. It's hunted, hypnotic, and spooky.
In stripping away convention,
occasionally lets his songs go to extremes with absurd simplicity, such as on
"Don't Go into That Barn,"
a musical cousin to his spoken
"What's He Building?"
from
Mule Variations
. But there's also the downright riotous squall of
"Shake It,"
which sounds like an insane carny barker jamming with
R.L. Burnside
, or the riotous raging
"Baby Gonna Leave Me."
There are "straight" narratives such as
"How's It Gonna End,"
with its slow and brooding beat storyline, and the moving murder
ballad
"Dead and Lovely,"
with its drooping, shambolic elegance. There's the
spoken word
"Circus,"
with its wispy spindly frame that features
on chamberlain. And
"Metropolitan Glide"
feels like a hell-bent duet between
James Brown
Captain Beefheart's Magic Band
, followed by the fractured, busted-love, ranting-at-God pain that rips through
"Make It Rain."
The tender
"Green Grass"
is among
' finest broken love songs; it's movingly rendered by a character who could have resided in one of
William Kennedy
's novels. The set closes with
"Day After Tomorrow,"
featured on
MoveOn.org
Future Soundtrack for America
. It is one of the most insightful and understated antiwar songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation.
is another provocative moment for
, one that has problems, but then, all his records do. His excesses, however, do nothing to cloud the stellar achievements of his risk-taking vision and often brilliant execution. ~ Thom Jurek