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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
CD Review: Tom Waits, Glitter and Doom Live
Posted by Eric Snider on Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 4:45 PM
Tom Waits concerts are real events: phantasmic orgies of twisted, postmodern vaudeville and rag-and-bone blues. Unfortunately, his last world tour does not translate all that well to a strictly audio format.
Sans visuals — the weird, low-tech theatrics, Waits' demented carnival-barker stage persona — the music on Glitter and Doom Live comes off as strident and lacking in nuance.
The iconoclastic artist, closing in on 60, now sings almost exclusively in a low, guttural bark that would make a cranky Rottweiler blush with envy. And when Waits is not barking, he occasionally emits banshees shrieks that would cause that Rottweiler to hide under the bed.
All of this gets rather tiresome after awhile. And it makes me wonder what happened to Waits' other vocal gears: the whispery rasp, the craggy croon, the barroom moan. Those textures crop up occasionally in this 17-song set, but not enough.
Wait's vocal barrage tends to obscure his Tin Pan Alley-esque melodies and render his post-beat poetics all but indecipherable. His versatile six-piece band, comprised mostly of multi-instrumentalists, provides simpatico backing, but is relegated to a decidedly subservient role.
The program, culled from shows throughout the tour, hews mostly to 1980s-and-forward Waits, after he had transitioned from hobo troubadour to visionary avant-gardist (sometimes taken to excess).
It's no surprise that the best performances are of tunes that most embrace Waits' cacophonous side: the barbed-wire rock 'n' roll of "Such a Scream" and "Metropolitan Glide," the bombastic blues of "Make it Rain." Conversely, the Waits bark strips ballads and shanties like "Falling Down" and "Lucky Day" of any rugged sweetness found in the studio versions.
A second disc, the 36-minute Tom Tales, is comprised of Waits-at-the-piano croaking monologues, strange and humorous observations about rats, graveyard shifts, what the moon smells like, Sarah Bernhardt's severed leg and other random stuff. (Out Nov. 24 on Anti-)
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