It’s been seven years since Tom Waits last released an album of all-new music — the interesting but not entirely successful experiment Real Gone — but his latest, Bad as Me (which is probably the most Tom Waits-esque album title possible) is a strong and welcome return to what he does best.
The album isn’t so much a step forward for Waits as it is a step back into his comfort zone, which he tried to push past on Real Gone by abandoning the foundation of his style — his keyboard. He doesn’t limit himself in any way on Bad as Me: It’s a Tom Waits album that seems consciously constructed to sound like a Tom Waits album, filled with desperate characters and guitars that sound like they should be playing on a transistor radio in some South Carolina brothel.
So the album might seem a bit familiar to longtime fans, but that’s hardly a bad thing when Waits’ writing and singing — er, musical grumbling — are as strong as they are here. He’s as wild-eyed, brilliant and hilarious as ever, and he can still turn a phrase like nobody’s business (“We bailed out the millionaires/ They’ve got the fruit/ We’ve got the rind,” he sings on the ghostly “Talking At The Same Time” over guitars that sound like they could have been lifted from the Twin Peaks soundtrack.)
But he doesn’t constrain himself to operating purely in back-alley-prophet mode throughout the entire album. The bustling opener “Chicago,” the junkyard boogie of “Get Lost,” and the kooky menace of the title track (“I’m the blood on the floor/ the thunder and the roar”) all wonderfully conform to his crazed saloon storyteller image, but Waits lets himself explore other areas of his personality on a few tracks.
People forget, but Waits began his career as a more melancholy, boozier Tony Bennett-type, before morphing into the devilish bluesman he’s known as today. If you look beneath the mudstains, he’s still got traces of that classicism. His persona at times still resembles an off-kilter lounge singer, albeit one who wouldn’t feel out of place going down to the crossroads at midnight to sell his soul with Robert Johnson.
He’s just as capable of delivering smoky, mournful, even romantic — yes, really — piano ballads such as “Kiss Me” as he is of acidic roadhouse blues. There are a number of legitimately lovely moments on Bad as Me — the Spanish tinge of “Back In The Crowd,” the quiet lamentation of “Last Leaf” — mixed in with the more expected material, such as the tribal stomp of “Hell Broke Luce.”
This mix of the beautiful and the repulsive makes for an experience that’s unique to Waits — sometimes he’s profound, sometimes he’s content to just wink and tell a dirty joke, but he’s never less than fascinating.
VERDICT: Bad as Me is everything you would want a Tom Waits album to be.
