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: orphans rule
Hit: 5 Stars
really great mix of all types of tom. he has he best voice whether speaking or singing. love itFree Music Review: Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards- Tom Waits
Hit: 5 Stars
Superb collection of songs, particularly Bawlers and Brawlers. Strongly recommend.Free Music Review: great album - must buy
Hit: 5 Stars
tom waits is one of the best and this album is further proof of his excellentness.Free Music Review: A trinity of Waits
Hit: 4 Stars
For the first two discs, this doesn't sound like a collection of tracks ranging from all over Waits' career that have been sitting on the butcher's floor--at least, other artists' collections of stuff that never made it onto previous albums have come across as inconsistent, for obvious reasons.
It would seem odd that Waits could overcome such shortcomings in such a collection, for the man has had such a long and artistically varying career, but there are at least two things working in Waits' favor for _Orphans_, aside from his ungodly level of talent: first, many of these tracks are not simply ones that didn't make the final cuts of his other albums. Waits has been a long contributor to soundtracks and variously themed albums--tributes, anthologies, etc. So rather than be tracks that others may have thought inadequate (and rightfully so), this collection contains strong tracks that have appeared on other albums, for example his legendary version of "Heigh Ho" from _Snow White_ which was done for a Disney tribute album that had contained such talents as Sinead O'Connor, Sun Ra and others. Also on here is "Poor Little Lamb," a song he put together for the movie _Ironweed_. So many of these tracks had simply not come out on a Waits-exclusive album...until now.
Also, Waits has established himself as such an eclectic artist, starting with closing-time growls in his early work to vastly intricate and avant-garde mini-operas. Waits pulled these stages together into a cohesive vision of him as a single artist with _Mule Variations_. Thus, Waits established himself as an artist able to explore his whole history of sound in one album, allowing this collection to sound very cohesive, as an expression of the work of a singular artist.
Waits also made this collection cohesive by grouping songs into tonal categories: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. Brawlers and Bawlers chould be pretty self-explanatory, though Bastards feels more like a disjointed collection disc than the others. I can listen to the first two discs as though enjoying the latest recordings by Mr. Waits, but Bastards seemed to become the repository for anything that couldn't fit easily into a category.
I will readily admit that Waits' work defines easy categorization, and so a disjointed collection like Bastards readily admits with its own title that this kind of disconnection should only help define this man's work, but it always seemed that Waits himself found ways to offer cohesive albums, whether through storylines as in _Frank's Wild Years_ or a simple tonal connection like there is among the songs on _Real Gone_.
Don't get me wrong--I will be listening to all three of these discs with pleasure again and again. Tom Waits is perhaps one of the most unique and immediately recognizable voices that we have--a little bit Louis Armstrong in its gruff and pathos, a little bit Brecht in its mechanicism and baroque tightness, and more than a little bit stinky man at the end of the bar. He is, perhaps, the most quintessential American artist we have today, and I would love to play everything he's done to every foreigner who thinks he knows what America is about.
Free Music Review: Greatest Virtues, Greatest Weakness
Hit: 4 Stars
Tom Waits' 2006 opus is an order of magnitude removed from much of the downloadable crap coming out of American music factories these days. Its ambition, musical diversity, and artistic accomplishment make it stand out and demand listeners reevaluate what they think music is. But its virtues feed into what is doubtless its greatest weakness: it is unbelievably long and demands listeners with sturdy constitutions.
Each of the three discs is unified by some theme, expressed musically rather than lyrically. Disc 1, Brawlers, is comprised of blistering bluesy tracks like those that made Waits famous back in the Eighties. Disc 2, Bawlers, is more sentimental and folksy, harkening back to his Grammy-winning "Mule Variations." Disc 3, Bastards, runs the gamut of experimental sound reminiscent of "Alice" and "Blood Money."
"Orphans" is 56 tracks long, and each disc is packed to the limits of a CD. Though they don't necessarily come together to comprise a whole like a concept album, they are a unified musical experience spotlighting the range of human emotions as felt by a musician. And not just any musician: as always, Waits' mind runs very differently than yours or mine, with deeper insights and more tumultuous feelings.
Waits plays with sound in a way not everyone will like. Most tracks are filtered to sound like someone's collection of treasured 78 RPM records; listeners weaned on CD-quality sound may dislike this muddiness. And the Tin Pan Alley ethos that informs the instrumentation is not one that young listeners are accustomed to. But these elements create the illusion of a bygone artist reminding us of truths we didn't know we'd forgotten.
Tom Waits albums have become perilously few and far between. Once a one-man revolution factory, sightings of him have achieved the rarity of UFOs. But that makes albums like this one only that much more valuable. If we don't know when we'll hear from him next, four hours of pure Waits gold is worth the effort of listening. It's really, really long, but it's really, really good.'