Tom Waits - Orphans [Fold-out Digipak with 24-page booklet]
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Free Music Notes for Orphans [Fold-out Digipak with 24-page booklet]
Free Music Review: i assume 5 stars is appropriate
Hit: 5 Stars
I bought this CD a couple of weeks ago, but haven't heard it. My husband immediately took it from me & hasn't given it back. "Oh, I keep forgetting it at work." He said it's great. Based on that & the other reviews, I'm giving it a 5 star rating anyway. :)
I plan on getting it by this weekend or going out to buy my own copy.
Free Music Review: Absolute Favorite Singer!
Hit: 5 Stars
I bought this the second I found out it was available for my husband who is a HUGE Waits fan. A gotta have!Free Music Review: It's Tom Waits, and therefore excellent
Hit: 5 Stars
Nobody does grizzled and world-weary quite like Tom Waits, and coming off 2004's incredible Real Gone, the mammoth three-disc collection Orphans is yet more proof of his bizarre genius. Even putting aside the abundance of great music it contains, it is, if nothing else, a fitting tribute to Waits's persistently uncommercial, marketing-be-damned approach to his music. Comprised of a whopping 54 songs (both Waits originals and covers) and clocking in at about three hours, Orphans is vintage Waits from beginning to end-unvarnished, unconventional, and uncompromising. Given the enormous amount of variety to be found here, everyone's going to have their personal favorites, but whichever tracks one prefers there's no denying that Orphans makes the perfect testament to Waits's endless creativity, stinging wit and gritty, PhD-in-life sensibility.
Waits has long been a a man of many personas-demented carnival barker, old testament prophet, Jesus freak, depression-era bluesman-and even more than his more traditional albums Orphans shows off his chameleonic nature to the fullest extent. With its ample available space, Orphans allows Waits to induldge in genre exercises ranging from rockabilly (Lie To Me); to baroque pop (Little Drop of Poison); to swamp blues (Buzz Fledderjohn); to gospel (Lord I've been changed) without ever sounding like just an imitator of his varied influences. That said, Waits is still at his best when he dwells in a musical territory all his own, be it noisy, free-form experimentation or more reflective, sparsely instrumented balladry.
Each disc brings with its own unique feel, with the first one feeling the most like a proper Waits album in the vein of such all-encompassing classics as Rain Dogs and Bone Machine. Waits gets his classic-rock fix taken are of early with the scorching Low Down, whose big, brash guitar riffs wouldn't sound out of place in the '60's. The clamorous percussion and dizzying time signatures of Fish in the Jailhouse should please fans of Waits's more eccentric side, or just those like this writer who crave something abrasive and weird. Providing a sharp contrast to these tunes, but still very much in line with Waits's overall approach, are the downcast resignation of the bluesy, guitar-driven Road to Piece (a seven-minute examination of the conflict in Israel) and the closing lament of Rains on Me.
The ballad-heavy second disc, while occasionally a tad forgettable, is still home to some of the most brilliant material of Waits's career. The triumphant Take Care of All of My Children is driven by a stirring, martial drum beat, while the following Down There by the Train manages to expertly combine sadness, regret, and hope through Waits's singularly poetic lyrical imagery ("There's no eye for an eye/There's no tooth for a tooth/I saw Judas Iscariot carryin' John Wilkes Booth"-brilliant). In somewhat of a curveball for Waits, Never Let Go is inspiring and poignant in its straightforward message of devotion. There's also a great, booze-sodden lament in Goodnight Irene, which finds Waits's nicotine-stained voice at its most raw and unhinged.
The third disc is a nod to every side of the schizophrenic last two decades of Waits's career, with unstructured noise explorations (the mutant jazz-blues-rock workout Heigh Ho is hard-edged and ominous even for Waits) to a slew of spoken-word pieces to some more tender ballads. Waits starts off the disc by breaking out his classic rasp on the delightfully malevolent What Keeps Mankind Alive, and backs himself up with some inspired vocal beat-boxing on the Spidey's Wild Ride and King Kong. The latter track is especially interesting, with Waits's pained wail augmented by some ear-piercing guitar squeals and a subterranean bass line as he declaims the tragic story of, well, King Kong, with all the gravity of a character delivering the closing monologue of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Free Music Review: Why did I wait so long before buying this CD?
Hit: 4 Stars
I've been aware of Tom Waits for many years and have purchased a few of his more popular songs online. However, this is the first album of his that I've bought. My criteria for album purchases is that the album price must be competitive with the sum of the download prices for all the songs that appeal to me when reviewing samples. I was not disappointed and will likely go back and buy some of his older albums.
For me, 4 stars is about as good as it gets because I reserve the 5 for perfection. The biggest negative for me was the lack of lyrics in the the lower cost edition.
Free Music Review: Indispensable "odds and ends" collection up from the underground
Hit: 5 Stars
My opinion is that Tom has 4 different phases in his recorded career. Closing Time/Heart of Sat. Night is the young folkie finding his way, Nighthawks to One From the Heart were gin soaked tales, Swordfishtrombones-Big Time captured Frank and his wild years. After this, you had a mix of all kinds of side projects, showing up on Primus' recordings, and in the middle of this particular journey, jumped ship from Island to go to Epitaph; Bone Machine and Mule Variations and Real Gone read like one story, Alice, Blood Money, and Black Rider read from a different one, but they were riding side by side over the same period of time. Orphans is kind of the bus stop in a one stop sign town, the connecting point to this more recent journey.
Was this put out due to the Tales From the Underground fan mix? Maybe, but I think he tried to make this as cohesive as possible so it stands on its own, but Tom provides a one stop for those odds and ends that wound up on other recordings (and other labels... the advantage of owning masters is being able to put a collection like this together which would've been impossible otherwise).
I'm hoping he puts something together with the live recordings over the past 9 years. Some of the tracks on here are live favorites that get their studio recorded debut.
You'll never hear "Heigh Ho" the same way again... as sung by Grumpy? "Little Drop of Poison" will be familiar to fans of Shrek 2.
If you like Closing Time, this one wouldn't be for you. If you like Small Change but don't have Mule Variations or Rain Dogs, get Beautiful Maladies and Mule Variations. If you became a fan from Mule Variations, you have this already.