Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones

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Free Music Notes for Swordfishtrombones

Free Music Review: Amazing and Uncompromizing
Hit: 5 Stars

Consequently, he re-invented himself in 1983 with Swordfishtrombones. Choosing to jettison his record label and produce the new album himself, he also left behind the combination of strings and piano that had backed so many of his previous songs, replacing them with scratchy electric guitars (often plucked), bizarre organs, glass harmonicas, and most of all, a huge variety of drums. The result is a CD full of arresting soundscapes in which his voice, always distinctive, becomes an instrument in its own right.

The lyrics are different also. Though he is still most certainly singing about life's unfortunates, the typical references to hookers, bars, and closing time are replaced with mystifying, often nightmareish story-lyrics in which the listener more often gets the gist, rather than the details, of the circumstances described. Though "Frank's Wild Years" is a spoken song and might at first seem similar to the spoken-word masterpieces of, say, Nighthawks at the Diner, this song is not about your typical drunkard but rather a psychopath who, unable to stand his suburban existance, burns down his house and drives away laughing.

In fact, discontent with the city is prevalent on the songs here; there's the unflatteringly depicted seaport in "Shore Leave," a "Town With No Cheer," and the suburban nightmare of "In The Neighborhood," which sounds like a Fourth-of-July anthem with a hangover. Of course, Waits himself would eventually move to the country, a move reflected in 1993's Bone Machine.

All in all, this disc is unbeatable. Waits's voice, sounding amazingly young and cocky compared with his recent releases, is in top form. His poetry, though considerably more obscure than what he has written afterward -- sometimes to the point of complete mystification -- is evocative and startling, and as always, sounds great when sung with Tom's unusual phrasing. And the music itself, ranging from the brutally percussive opener "Underground" to the wild blues-rock of "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six," to the acerbic organ on "Frank's Wild Years," and the obligatory gorgeous ballads "Johnsburg, Illinois" and "Soldiers Things," is among the best Waits ever composed.

Swordfishtrombones, which was both an important career move for Waits and an album on which every song matters and is well placed, should not be missed by anyone interested in some of the best American popular music of all time.

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