Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Tom WaitsEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1990-06-15
Music Label: Island
Soundtracks:
- Underground
- Shore Leave
- Dave the Butcher [Instrumental]
- Johnsburg, Illinois
- 16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six
- Town With No Cheer
- In the Neighborhood
- Just Another Sucker on the Vine [Instrumental]
- Frank's Wild Years
- Swordfishtrombone
- Down, Down, Down
- Soldier's Things
- Gin Soaked Boy
- Trouble's Braids
- Rainbirds [Instrumental]
Free Music Notes for Swordfishtrombones
Free Music Review: Has to be one of pop music's most underrated albums
Hit: 5 Stars
I used to love this album in the late 80s and early 90s, but recently started listening to it again after a long hiatus (my wife hates TW, it ended up). Let me say this album is something of a minor miracle. It's hard to describe how evocative it is, but there is something about the coupling of the musical production and the lyrical imagination that is pure magic. When Waits creates the character of the American soldier on shore leave, who talked baseball with a lieutenant and shot billiards with a midget until the rain stopped, who bought a razor and some gum and knife and a t-shirt with horses on the front, the ambiance is enhanced by the clinging cowbells, thumping bass and other musical innovations that bring this scene to an almost theatrical life.
Unlike today's iPod culture which encouraged the consumption of "singles" and "favorite hits" without any kind of extended context, this album should be consumed and enjoyed in its entirety to get the full effect. "Frank's Wild Years", "Gin Soaked Boy", "In the Neighborhood" etc certainly hold up on their own, but as an ensemble they are tantamount to major artistic achievment.
Swordfishtrombones Poster
The first album of the loose trilogy that also includes Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years, Swordfishtrombones marked a radical departure for Waits, whose avant-garde ambitions became plain not so much in his lyrics or subject matter--the songs here deal, as do his older albums, with hard life on the wrong side of the tracks and dreams of escape and transcendence--but in the music, a sound somewhere between German cabaret music from between the wars and contemporary Manhattan rush hour. Odd time signatures, unusual instrumentation (glass harmonicas and brake drums, among others), and Waits's barked vocals make this one of his most individualistic and challenging albums. --Daniel DurchholzAlternative Rock Music CDs
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