[Today: Tom Waits runs away and joins the circus...]
Rain Dogs is populated by slaughterhouse bigshots, drunken jockeys, demented ship captains, small-town Napoleons, and strangers with weeds in their hearts. It’s a carnival of sadness and loss, and its odd instrumentation and off-kilter rhythms roughly approximate the sound of mental illness. But Tom Waits doesn’t just sit and stare at these bums, clowns and madmen – he inhabits the characters fully, giving them a dose of humanity that reveals the hopes and dreams living inside even the most deranged and desperate soul.
Waits is a master at taking an everyday object (like a dish outside the window filled with rain) and turning it into a metaphor for the hopeless, lonely nature of life itself. He’s one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation, but he goes to great lengths to disguise the poetry at the heart of his tunes. “And you’re East of East St. Louis/and the wind is making speeches/and the rain sounds like a round of applause” is just one of the magical couplets that he hides behind the raspy razor-wire of his voice. It took Rod Stewart to make ‘Downtown Train’ into a hit, mainly because Waits’ voice is so inaccessible to most listeners.
If Rain Dogs is ever criticized, it’s usually for being too ‘sprawling’. At 19 songs and 54 minutes, it’s not an excessively long album, but it is so full of ideas and imagery (much that doesn’t make obvious sense) that it can feel dense and impenetrable. But if this album is sprawling, it’s a mental sprawl that reaches for ideas and dimensions that most music doesn’t touch. This 1985 release saw Waits move ever farther from the beatnik/bluesman persona that defined him during the 70′s. Here he slipped into the dark, shadowy world of back alleys, bordellos and sewers, and made the kind of music that creates its own steam and leaves you coated in sticky, restless agitation. Rain Dogs is a musical marvel, and the album that turned Tom Waits into a mad genius.
Listen: Singapore
Listen: Time
3 April 2009 at 6:47 pm |
Raindogs is an absolutely essential album. Even the weakest tracks are sublime.