Tom Waits - Rain Dogs
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.09 You Save: $7.89 (66%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.80 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Rain Dogs
Free Music Review: One of Tom Waits' Greatest Albums!
Hit: 5 Stars
When I run across fellow Tom Waits admirers, it seems we frequently find ourselves in the "Pre-Swordfishtrombones" camp or the "Post-Swordfishtrombones" camp. The Pre folks love his love ballads and bluesy works like "Martha" and "Spare Parts," while the Post folks appreciate his artistic and experimental works that seemed to really kick in with the above-mentioned work.I'm one of the Pre-Folks. I dig the melodic Waits, his humorous tunes and love songs. That said, I found "Rain Dogs" to be an incredible meeting of the experimental Waits and the traditional Waits.
"Rain Dogs" followed Swordfishtrombones, and I was told by friends to expect similar work. I was pleasantly surprised from the start; The opening song "Singapore" sets the stage for a fabulous CD packed full of music with an artsy edge to it. While the romantic songs are quality traditional Waits, the tunes that steal the show are ones like "Singapore," "Diamonds and Gold," and "Cemetary Polka" which are eerie works of storytelling as only Waits can do. This might sound like a stretch, but if a master storyteller like Robert Louis Stevenson were required to spin a "Treasure Island" style tale into a short haunting song instead of a novel, the result could be something along the lines of these tunes!
I especially enjoy the lyrics in the opening tune where new sailors are welcomed to the night boat headed for Singapore: "Wipe him down with gasoline/ til his arms are hard and mean/ from now on boys, this iron boat's your home." Add Waits' gravel voice with the clunky instrumentals, you get a very cool and haunting tune!
I wouldn't go as far to say this is my favorite Tom Waits album, but if you are becoming an avid fan, I believe that "Rain Dogs" is an essential addition to your collection.
Free Music Review: THE Waits album to get
Hit: 5 Stars
Tom Waits wasn't the first musician I loved, but he was the first for whom I felt real passion. Before him meandered a mediocre array of pop stars and one hit wonders; it would not be stretching the truth to say Waits was the first extraordinarily talented musician who got my attention.I love his early stuff, Closing Time, Heart of Saturday Night, and the like - heck, it was the first stuff I was exposed to - but it was Rain Dogs which really made me realise this was MY musik! I was fourteen.
It's the Waits-style introduced on Swordfish Trombones, expanded on in Frank's Wild Years, and finally perfected on Rain Dogs. There isn't a person I wouldn't recommend this album to (thinking about it, I imagine there would be people who wouldn't like it, but it's difficult to conceive!) It mixes the best of his early style with exciting experimentation, his amazing lyrics, and that incomparable voice. The irrisistable mood conjured up on Rain Dogs - one of underworld darkness, unrequited love, rolling good times and uncertain lives - is unmatched among male artists since 1985.
Favourite on this album are the title track,Singapore, Cemetary Polka, Tango Till They're Sore, Diamonds and Gold, Downtown Train and Anywhere I Lay My Head. But all are classic. Waits is a talent rarely seen, especially in the last 30 years. It's a shame that his refusal to conform has resulted in his being virtually unknown in the popular musik scene today, but it also makes his work all the more precious.
While there isn't a Waits album yet I haven't loved for it's own unique and beautiful charactertistics, Rain Dogs is my absolute favourite, and is, I believe, his best. Please, if you only ever listen to one Waits in your life - make it this album.
Free Music Review: My favorite album by a solo artist
Hit: 5 Stars
I bought this album in February 2002, when I was kind of going through a rough time. My girlfriend and I were on the verge of breaking up, which was pretty difficult for me. And these songs all spoke to me. Tom Waits has a way of saying things so simple yet very profound, and his voice is very eloquent, although it's very throaty. His use of unusual instruments such as the marimba, and the jarring percussion, and the dissonant guitar tones reflected the paranoia and anguish I seemed to be going through at the time, and I can't think of an album I've listened to more than Rain Dogs. The title even speaks of loneliness. A "rain dog," is supposedly an abandoned dog that has been left out side to fend for himself, or to die. At that time, I felt pretty inferior as I was being thrown out of another one's life, which I have since recovered from, and I learned to live with myself. Before then, I never really knew what the possibilities in music were, and this and other Waits albums, completely opened the floodgates to what was possible out there, and a lot of my writing is influenced by Waits, but I don't really mimic his style.
I'm sure everyone who has bought this album looked at music at a newer perspective, because it certainly did for me, and my friends who have heard this album. It's full of emotion and idealism that you can't help but feel like this record at times. In my Top 10 of Favorite Albums of all time, and certainly my favorite by a solo artist (with Nick Drake's bleak Pink Moon coming in a close second, following any Peter Gabriel album).
Free Music Review: Welcome To His World
Hit: 5 Stars
I bought this album in college, at the height of my U2 craze, when Bono listed it in the ROLLING STONE artists' poll as one of his favorites. I thought, "Hey, it'll probably sound like U2."Ha! The record starts off with the squawk of a deranged parrot, then into the lurching, alcohol-soaked marimba rhythms of "Singapore." After a brief intro, Waits begins to croak in a devilish growl: "We sail tonight for Singapore / We're all as mad as hatters here."
Mad indeed. The characters that populate "Rain Dogs" are losers, loners and drifters, their stories spilled out of an old burlap bag full of evocative details. ("All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes.") Waits' loping arrangements support the lyrics with an almost cinematic eye toward unforgettable images. If you close your eyes, you can almost feel the grit and grime of the timeless city Waits paints, as fractured guitar riffs by the likes of Marc Ribot, GE Smith, and Keith Richards tumble over drunken rhythms and freight-train rockers.
Back in college, my girlfriend and I laughed at "Rain Dogs" when we first heard it. I thought about selling it to a used CD shop, but I was having so much fun playing for my friends as a lark! Soon, however, I found myself hooked into this strange and foreign place -- and this visionary artist who has always followed his own path. If you're the type of listener who can get into something completely original, "Rain Dogs" -- along with its companion pieces "Swordfishtombones" and "Franks Wild Years" -- is the musical diversion you've been waiting for.
Free Music Review: An Ancient Wind Blew The Songs Of Rain Dogs To Earth
Hit: 5 Stars
Rain dogs, rain dogs. Rain dogs are these songs... songs that time will carry on and mould and disfigure and shape and mend and break and heal and reinvent and immortalise. Songs that belong to no period of time. Songs that belong only to eternity. Songs that belong to us all. A gentleman performer and songcrafter, Mr. Tom Waits, recieved these vignettes from somewhere only he and his sweetheart, the darling Mrs. Kathleen, knew of. A secret place that smelled of whiskey and Brut cologne and where old men wore top hats and gesticulated with walking sticks the horses.
And Rain Dogs came to our knowledge. It was always alive, somewhere, hidden away until Mr. Waits found it and transmitted it to us, the living. These songs were sang by the dead. Now we can enter this universe that Waits puts to english and we too can sail tonight for singapore, see old men in tailor-made suits fall from windows with confetti in their hair from an American-Italian 3rd class housing district in Manhattan in June 1931, we can play the accordian for Mr. Rice, we can walk Spanish down the hall and, of course, we can dance with the Rose of Tralee. How many of you know what the Rose of Tralee is, and who is that Rose?
So sacrifice your heartstrings and let them be plucked relentlessly by tales of downtown trains, time and Morea. Cinncinati. Some men will do it for diamonds, some men will do it for gold. It's all there. The deeper you search, the more you'll understand....
.... for you... are a rain dog too....