Tom Waits - Rain Dogs
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.99 You Save: $7.99 (67%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.78 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Rain Dogs
Free Music Review: Best of the 80's TOM WAITS records
Hit: 5 Stars
That's not counting the One From the Heart soundtrack he did at the request of Francis Ford Coppala. That album remained true to his 70's sound when it appears Tom was already shifting to his quite different 80's sound.
The 70's Tom brought us smoky piano lounge music and done to perfection on Heart of Saturday Night and Small Change. One From the Heart is no slouch either, assuming you don't mind hearing Crystal Gayle throughout the album which isn't that difficult. One thing's for sure, Tom has his own sound. He almost pulled the heart out of the essence of a musical sound, the piano playing, smoking blusey, smart aleck, love torn, even love hopeful character out of an era before the rock era. He embodied the character and seemed to have a lot of fun with it, taking us to that place in the seedy heart of L.A. and gifting us with his imagery and Louie Armstrong invoking voice, yet a voice distinctly his own.
The 80's? What's this shift he made musically from the 70's to the 80's? It got wilder, less smoky, less just him at the piano focused and more of maybe a clanging New Orleans inspired noise merchant who could still construct a lovely melody and evoke vivid images, only now the musical palate was expanded, more unexplored territory. Yet, he seemed to know where he was going. Some of these songs, Singapore, Clap Hands, Time and Rain Dogs jump off the page, gems formed by Tom and given to us for the ages. The album works as a whole. It's a journey he takes, an artist painting with words, images he sees and feels and shares with us. Tom is able to convey his emotions in his songs as well as take us to a place we've never been, or, if we have some vague familiarity with the terrain, we sure haven't been down to this part of his personal town. Heck, the more I think about it, this album is sorta like a movie or a book in a way that most musicians are not able to accomplish. He's both a wordsmith and someone who creates whole, a universe that we may have had a hint existed but he brings us right in, shows us around and, like the best artists, entertains us and reminds us of our own emotional journeys.
Feel free to purchase this album if you have not yet already. At 19 songs, the guy isn't skimpin' and there's not a dud in the box. chrisbct@hotmail.com
Free Music Review: a very varied album, one of the best records of the 80s
Hit: 5 Stars
this is one of the coolest albums i own. I think this is really where Waits started perfecting his stranger musical writings, but there's still plenty of room for the sligtely more normal songs of his earlier style.
begining with the see shanty singapore, waits uses his idiosyncratic voice in a great way with the chanting, and the malets are awesome. one of my favorites on the album is clap hands, which uses mallets again, but perhaps in an even cooler way than on singapore. this song has some of the most interesting lyrics on the record, my favorite line being 'a Cincinatti jacket and a sad luck dame; hanging out the window with a bottle full of rain.' the song creates an atmosphere of the most exagerated old school urban decadence, completely grey and raw. cemetary polka sees chanting again, but somehow the style is quite different than on clap hands.
to me the coolest part of the delivery of waits is his ability to use his voice to conjure so many different sounds and emotions. this record goes from the delicacy of time to the surreal bark of cemetery polka, desperate and intense on anywhere i lay my head, and swinging and groving on walking spanish and jockey full of bourbon. and just as his voice itself is varried, so too are the song styles, instrumentation, and overall feel the songs give off. somehow waits is able to go from popular music to avant garde strangness so fast and so smoothly that he creates a sound totaly his own on totaly different songs. if you told me waits had multiple personality disorder problems around the recording of this record i might believe you.
as this record is in the middle of his discography i think it is one of the most essential, it just showcases so much. one thing i think people have to realize is that there wasn't a perfect point when Waits started playing very strange music, and to me that slowely happened until his albums became more consistantly in one style again. some of the songs here are very weird, such as diamonds and gold, but others are pop songs, such as downtown train. i suppose not everyone will feel this is a good thing, this album doesn't have the emotional or concistancy, nor the pure strangness of an album like Blood Money, but it probably has better songs. get it.
Free Music Review: Oddly addictive...
Hit: 5 Stars
An album this far of left field can rarely be described as addictive, but I've played this one about a million times and I never get tired of it. I have to admit though, I have purchased "Rain Dogs" three times in my life and ended up selling it the first two times I owned it because I just didn't get it. I don't think I was open minded enough to listen to this one the whole way through in my teen years, but the third time was a charm and this disc got it's hooks into me completely. On "Rain Dogs" Waits continued to experiment with the unique instrumentation he used on his previous release "Swordfishtrombones" and really took it to the next level, the result being one of his best albums. Not to mention he employed the likes of Keith Richards, G.E. Smith, and Robert Quine (a Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Lou Reed alumnus), which didn't hurt. While some of the songs off this disc are bizarre and abrasive, there are others that are so accessible one wonders why they didn't take the world by storm; for every "Singapore" there is a "Time", for every "Clap Hands" there is a "Downtown Train". I can't think of any other album from the 1980's which has aged this well and is loaded with so many great songs and great moments: the classic Keith Richards riffs on "Union Square", the screeching "Midtown", (which would have been perfect for a car chase scene in the movies), the bluesy groove of "Gun Street Girl" (which is achieved through such minimal instrumentation that it's genius), the explosive vocal Waits delivers on "Anywhere I Lay My Head" which threatens to blow your stereo speakers out with it's intensity, the country feel to "Blind Love" which features Waits' gravelly voice backed by Keith Richards' harmonies, and the list could go on and on. Like most of Waits' releases "Rain Dogs" was critically acclaimed but didn't sell in big numbers and has gone on to achieve a large cult following. It stands as one of his best albums, and I would include it as one of my favorite albums of all time. Once it gets it's hooks into you nothing else will hit the spot the way "Rain Dogs" does. Also recommended if you like this one is the live album "Big Time", where Waits bends and twists the arrangements of some of the songs off this album with great results.Free Music Review: Waits' best album--and that's really saying something!
Hit: 5 Stars
It has been said that Britain may have spawned the Beatles and 90% of all other great musicians of our era, but that America makes up for it by having Tom Waits. Listen to this album and you might start to see why.I am admittedly a fan of the "middle" period of Waits' career. I find his early work interesting because it shows him trying to find his personal "voice"--a songwriting idiom that works for him. Waits began his career by writing mostly formulaic love songs with a blues edge or wistful melodies sung alone with solo-piano accompaniment. Then, with "Heartattack and Vine" and "Frank's Wild Years" Waits was beginning to find his voice. Here, he finally found it.
First of all, this album is most consistent in placing three of Waits' constant themes in almost every song: rain, whiskey, and trains. Almost any image you can conjure up featuring those three things is probably found in a Waits song somewhere. The songs on this album also display a variety of subject matter sometimes lacking on Waits albums. There are uptempo, upbeat songs, humorous short ditties that sound like nursery rhymes, and a lot of what Waits does best: songs with a catchy tempo or a hum-along chorus that you can hear over and over and then realize they're simultaneously the saddest and most haunting songs you've ever heard. Songs on this album which fit this description are "Rain Dogs", "Downtown Train" (shame on you if you thought that was a Rod Stewart original!), and "Hang Down Your Head".
Tom's next album, "Swordfishtrombones", comes close to the lyrical virtousity and perfect blend of musical skill and eccentricity displayed here. Since then he has tried many different directions with his music and his latest two albums show that he is on the verge of making another masterpiece like this one any day now. Don't get me wrong, his latest work is a hundred times better than anything else out there today, but "Rain Dogs" is definitely the place to start.
Free Music Review: Howlin' Wolf does the Threepenny Opera
Hit: 5 Stars
This record is again a loosely connected ensemble of stories about lowlifes and misfits like "Swordfish," but with several differences. The main one is the size -- this record is substantially longer (four songs and 15 minutes) than "Swordfish", and you can feel the difference in longer songs and in its sprawling scope. Most of the characters in "Swordfish" reappear throughout the record, but "Rain Dogs" characters are anonymous and could be anybody from a gritty downtown neighborhood at any point in history.The songs on this record are longer, stronger individually and just damned good. "Downtown Train" is a massive pop song with Waits' characteristic grit thrown over it. "Anywhere I Lay My Head" is a heart-rending gospel number that Waits delivers like a cross between a streetcorner preacher and an enraged drunk. There are some psycho blues raveups ("Union Square," "Big Black Mariah), a few spoken songs ("9th and Hennepin," "Walking Spanish), some folksy tunes ("Time" is the prettier end, "Gun Street Girl" is the more tossed-off end).
Waits' arrangements, frequently criticized by snobbier listeners, are in many ways the most effective point of the record. The elegiac trumpet with the harmonium on "Anywhere I Lay My Head" is a good example of mood. Listen to the layers of percussion on "Clap Hands" or "Jockey Full of Bourbon," which evoke late-night dives in New Orleans where the house musicians are 1920's Berliners. Hmm. The minimalist banjo/percussion of "Gun Street Girl" perfectly aid the caper-gone-wrong narrative.
Get this record! There's no good analogy in pop today to Waits.