Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.15 You Save: $6.83 (57%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $4.98 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Swordfishtrombones
Free Music Review: Genius
Hit: 5 Stars
Few artists ever seek to completely re-invent themselves on record, and fewer still make the transformation as completely successfully as did Tom Waits. His 70's albums are revered for their delicate, string-landen piano work with Waits croaking out lyrical strands of barstool philosophizing in a pseudo-Louis Armstrong growl. These albums are good, strong efforts, but they had become somewhat predictable by the time of 1980's Heart Attack & Vine (although that album, and it's predecessor, Blue Valentine, had started to introduce new elements into Waits's music.) Swordfishtrombones, then, was a complete re-invention. Out go the strings and piano work (almost entirely in the case of the former, much less overt in the case of the latter), out go to late night bar-obsessed Beat poetry of the lyrics, out goes the Louis Armstrong growl. This album, instead, featured light, sparse, percussion-driven arrangements, with chugging basslines and occasional freakish burts of kaleidoscopic guitar. Lyrically, it was still drenched in weirdness, but moreso than ever - Waits's tales range from the insane poetry that would come to dominate his next album, Rain Dogs (Underground, Shore Leave), to his other typical 80's style song that he still leans on heavily in concert when he plays (16 Shells, Down, Down, Down), to the outright bizzarre and hilarous (Frank's Wild Years, In The Neighborhood.) We also see his vocals take on a more Howlin' Wolf-esque leaning - one critic described the album as sounding like "The Three Penny Opera as sung by Howlin' Wolf." Although this was the prototype for all the rest of his albums since it, it can be a bit hard to get used to (not that all of his albums aren't), if you are used to his earlier efforts. But, like any great album, it takes some time to grow on you. After several listens, you will come to appreciate that this is an album of unique genius. Rain Dogs would be the apex of this era of Tom's songwriting, and his masterpiece may indeed have come in 1992 with Bone Machine, but Swordfishtrombones is a brave, admirable total re-invention the likes of which we almost never see. It's an essential Waits album.Free Music Review: Swordfishtrombones
Hit: 5 Stars
Tom Waits-Swordfishtrombones *****
My relationship with Swordfishtrombones is as follows; there are days where I will feel that this album is Waits' best, then there are other days where I think it is just another one of Waits' great albums but certainly not is best. regardless of which day it is I do feel that it is among the elite in Waits' cannon. If it is not the best it is for sure one of the best he ever released, and is with out a doubt the second best he released during the 1980s, right behind the amazing Rain Dogs.
This was a departure for Waits away from his almost crooner style he had created for himself. During the 1970's he was very much the musical equivalent of Charlie Chaplin. A tramp if you will. The lyrics are still the same; that whole beat writer meats Bob Dylan in the town cafe, but it is the music, the junkyard flavor of instrumentation that is so different. Instead of the basic jazzy out fit he lobbied for break drums, and glass harmonicas to name just a few. But more then that is the strange time signatures he used that would make even the great Frank Zappa scratch his head in amusement.
Songs like the albums opener 'Underground' and 'In The Neighborhood' come like a complete culture shock almost to the fans of old Waits. The amazing title track sounds fresh and new yet it still holds on to the Waits material of the 1970's. 'Gin Soaked Blues' is a rough electric blues, while 'Soldiers Things' is downright melancholy. 'Franks Wild Years' was a sign of this and the next two albums, and 'Down, Down, Down' is pure bliss. But perhaps it is the genius of '16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six' that most makes the album. Eventually the great Bob Seger would cover this but not to the same accord. Waits' original version is cool, and chilling. The strongest track off the album easily.
Swordfishtrombones was Waits' tribute album to the great Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. He did a swell job I must say. This is truly for those looking for something a little different but still intelligent. Swordfishtrombones is a true classic.
Free Music Review: Another way to look at music is here
Hit: 5 Stars
Circa 1983, Judas Priest and AC/DC filling most of my vinyl collection, it's 11:25 p.m. on a school night, and I'm up watching David Letterman for no particular reason other than not wanting to go to bed. On comes a strange little man with a gravel filled, cigarette burned, whisky soaked voice and a billy goat beard, claiming he was born in the backseat of a taxicab. What? Then he plays "Franks Wild Years", which was just plain foreign music to a teenage metalhead. But I liked it enough to keep watching. Letterman asks him to play another, so he plays "one of (his) favorites", which turned out to be "On the Nickel" from Heart Attack and Vine. I went out and bought Swordfishtrombones and Heart Attack and Vine the next day. What's my point? Tom Waits is great. Talented, funny, quirky, strange, brilliant, and lyrically captivating at times....don't believe me....read the words to "Shore Leave" or "Johnsburg, Illinois". And the music is so original and different, it fills the void where "normal music" fall right off the face of the Earth. It's tough being a Tom Waits fan in the midst of a world that just don't get it. But we are out there and love each other's conversation on the subject. Back when I first started dating my (now) wife, she loved Tom from the song I played. Blonde haired, blue eyed babe who loved Tom Waits from the first listen.....Now THAT was an attraction.
"Rain Dogs", "Frank's Wild Years", "Bone Machine", "Black Rider", "Mule Variations" I love, love, love 'em all, even when everyone around me is yelling to put on something else.....
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.
Free Music Review: I LOVE TOMMY WEIGHTS
Hit: 5 Stars
I can't get over how awesome Tom Waits is. I think he is my generation's Neil Diamond. He writes songs about things I don't understand at all. I be listening to the opening track off this gem and understood the song to be about a war in Bolivia over collard greens. I'm not sure if that is what the song is really about, but his delivery is so silky smooth that you really don't care. He reminds a lot of Josh Groban with his voice. It's very smooth and pleasing. I was on a date with a supermodel from Iowa last week and put this disc on. She got a little mad because she thought she was going to get some love because I put on the mood music. I told her that her love was being delivered later, but to just be quiet and listen to the vocal stylings of the next Bryan Ferry. Weights is one of those artists that it is not cool to like, kind of like telling people you love Mtv now. I'm not at all ashamed to admit that I like Tom Weights more than Chris Deburgh at this point. He's still not Josh Groban or Peter Cincinnati, but he certainly won't make you puke when you listen to him. Get this CD because Tom is neato.