The most instantly recognizable facet of Tom Waits' act is his voice. A cross between Louis Armstrong gurgling turpentine and the Cookie Monster bellowing like a drunk hobo, Waits' vocal chords are so instantly identifiable that they've literally become a trademark.
To wit: the singer successfully sued Frito-Lay in 1988 after the company copped his larynx-grinding delivery for a Doritos ad.
Real Gone, Waits' 20th album, is a love-letter to the singer's nails and sandpaper vocals. Twisted, maimed, and cut-up, Waits' voice is center stage on the record; so much so that you can think of Real Gone as a concept album - a sort of Journey to the Center of the Voice.
Track one finds our intrepid troubadour crawling down his own throat. By the finish (track 15), Waits emerges at the other end, covered in slime and booze, shrieking like a newborn.
Recorded in an abandoned Mississippi schoolhouse with his wife and songwriting partner, Kathleen Brennan, Real Gone has the blues-derived dirges and teary-eyed ballads you would expect to find in that setting, as well as a few leftfield cuts (and that's saying a lot for an artist who has never exactly been centered) courtesy of Waits' 18-year-old son Casey and his turntables.
In a move that Icelandic singer Bj?¶rk (another artist who's all vox) beat them to by a month, Waits and son created much of the percussion on Real Gone from snippets of dad's Tourettic howls. The result is a hall-of-mirrors effect, with a thousand Tom Waits roaring nonsensically from every dark corner of the album.
Astonishingly and improbably, the experiment pays off. At times, Waits sounds like a speaker-of-tongues jazz scatting ("Baby Gonna Leave Me"). Elsewhere, it's as if he's coughing up a rat ("Metropolitan Glide").
"Top of the Hill," the album's opening track, and the place where Casey's scratching and Waits' army of permanently scratched voices meet most convincingly, is a testament to just how bizarrely brilliant Real Gone can be.
Besides for the ever-present Waits-Voice, the other star of Real Gone is guitarist Marc Ribot. A longtime collaborator who hasn't collaborated in a long time, Ribot's grimy, staccato blues-riffs have been almost as integral to Waits' oeuvre as the singer's voice.
In full form on Real Gone, Ribot's mannered playing provides a counterpoint to the cacophony above - he even gets a turn in the spotlight with a writhing guitar solo on "Hoist That Rag."
It might be due to the family affair, or it might be Ribot's return, but Real Gone sounds like the most fun Waits has had in ages.
As we've come to expect, the album has the regular parade of misfits, degenerates, and down-and-outs populating a world forever tearing apart at the seams. But there's a laughing self-parody of Waits' mystique that invades every edge of Real Gone, not only in the ever-multiplying voices, but in the very tissue of the songs.
After setting up a particularly lamentable tale - "She took all my money / and my best friend" - Waits debases his own doom and gloom formula with, "You know the story / here it comes again."
With the songs and the singing both doubling back upon themselves on Real Gone, it's tempting to see the latest album as yet another turning point in Waits already well-torqued career.
From gin-soaked loser-lounge singer to boho experimenter to gnarled elder statesman, Waits' evolution has been constant but strangely timeless, as if every reinvention were planned well in advance.
Part of the vacuum-sealed feel to Waits' career comes from the music itself. As the singer's demi-monde has become ever more intricate and introverted over the years, there's been an exponential break with reality.
It's always fall in Waitsland; someone is always dying or getting drunk; a one-eyed carnie or a dim-witted giant is often skulking from afar.
An album that isn't sure which way to turn, Real Gone represents a simultaneous break with and redoubled flight back into Waitsland. And so there are tracks that come off like second-rate karaoke (the spoken-word "Circus," which has the aforementioned carnies and dim-witted giants skulking in excess), alongside songs that have the look of standard Waits, but a different feel entirely - the devastating "Day After Tomorrow," which tells the story of a young soldier in Iraq longing for home: "What I miss you won't believe / shoveling snow and raking leaves."
And while it's evident that Waits' songs have suddenly become topical, what's even odder is that the world itself has become a little more like a Tom Waits tune: bloodier, stranger, and sadder.
