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ALICE/BLOOD MONEY
Tom Waits
(Anti/Epitaph)
"No one puts flowers on a flower's grave."
"Adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults," is how Tom Waits describes Alice. "A maelstrom or fever-dream; a tone poem with torch songs and waltzes... an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense."
I can't compete with that.
Suffice it to say, Alice is all of those things. Along with Blood Money, the second of two new Waits releases due in stores Tuesday, it's every bit the sort of thing we've come to expect from the songwriter in recent years: A wonky gem; a smudged beauty.
Alice is actually a fresh recording of an avant-garde opera Waits staged with director Robert Wilson in Hamburg a decade ago. (It was based on Paul Schmidt's play about Lewis Carroll and his obsession with the girl who inspired Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.) The music has already made the rounds via a bootleg demo version that surfaced in recent years, but this version goes a long way in fleshing out the songs to an appropriately haunting scale.
It's as if Waits, in his way, has constructed the Alice-world from wood and stone instead of tape and metal. The tracks are dark, rich, and vibrant, and shape-shift behind the smoke-cured singer -- scratchy jazz shuffles (Alice, Table Top Joe), swooning ballads (Flower's Grave, Poor Edward, I'm Still Here), string suites (No One Knows I'm Gone, Fish & Bird), a section of cabaret scenes (Lost In The Harbour, Reeperbahn), and nightmarish nursery rhyme (Kommienezuspadt).
If there's something blue-green and shady about Alice, Blood Money is flame red.
A worthy sequel to Waits' 1999 masterpiece Mule Variations -- it's a swampy, carnivalesque trip. Horns clunk along luridly as the singer works himself into a froth like a preacher at the pulpit.
There's something strangely comforting in the gallows humour of Misery Is The River Of The World, Everything Goes To Hell, Knife Chase, and God's Away On Business. And while all this amounts to what is easily the more harrowing listen of the two albums -- and that's saying something -- Waits delivers relief in vintage form with Coney Island Baby and Lullaby.
Alice and Blood Money are oddly complimentary -- intertwined even.
In a pinch, pick Alice. Otherwise, treat both as essential companion pieces. (More on Tom Waits)
Track Listing ALICE
BLOOD MONEY