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Tom Waits: Bad as Me

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: ANTI Records
Released: 2011
Time:
 53:59
Category: Blues, Rock, Experimental
Producer(s): Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.tomwaits.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Chicago (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 2:15
[2] Raised Right Men (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 3:24
[3] Talking at the Same Time (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 4:14
[4] Get Lost (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 2:42
[5] Face to the Highway (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 3:43
[6] Pay Me (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 3:14
[7] Back in the Crowd (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 2:49
[8] Bad as Me (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 3:10
[9] Kiss Me (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 3:41
[10] Satisfied (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 4:05
[11] Last Leaf (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 2:56
[12] Hell Broke Luce (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 3:57
[13] New Year's Eve (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 4:32

            Bonus Tracks:
[14] She Stole The Blush (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 2:51
[15] Tell Me (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 3:43
[16] After You Die (T.Waits/K.Brennan) - 2:47

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Tom Waits - Vocals on [1-13], Guitar on [1-4,6,7,9-11,13], Piano on [1,6,8,9], Percussion on [1,4,5,12], Banjo on [1], Tablas on [2], Pump Organ on [11], Additional Photography, Producer

Marc Ribot - Guitar on [1-8,10-12]
Clint Maedgen - Saxophone on [1,3,4,8,10,12,13]
Casey Waits - Drums on [1,2,4,5,7,8,10,12]
David Hidalgo - Guitar on [3,4,6,7,12], Violin on [6], Percussion on [7], Accordion, Bass, Background Vocals on [13]
Ben Jaffe - Trombone on [1,3,4], Bass Clarinet on [1], Tuba on [12,13]
Charlie Musselwhite - Harmonica on [1,2,8,10,12]
Patrick Warren - Keyboards on [3-5,10,13]
James Whiton - Bass on [3,5-7,11]
Keith Richards - Guitar on [1,10-12], Vocals on [11]
Augie Meyers - Vox Organ on [2], Piano on [3], Accordion on [6]
Gino Robair - Percussion on [3, 5, 10], Vibraphone on [6]
Larry Taylor - Guitar on [1,2], Bass on [1,4]
Chris Grady - Trumpet on [3,12,13]
Flea - Bass on [2,12]
Will Bernard - Guitar on [6,12]
Dawn Harms - Violin on [5]
Marcus Shelby - Bass on [9]
Les Claypool - Bass on [10]
Zack Sumner - Bass on [13], Assistant Engineer

Kathleen Brennan - Producer
Julianne Deery - Assistant Producer
Karl Derfler - Engineer, Mixing
Bernie Grundman - Mastering
Trevor Hernandez - Art Direction
Jesse Dylan - Photography

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2011 CD ANTI 87151-2



Bad as Me is the seventeenth studio album by American rock musician Tom Waits, released on October 21, 2011 by ANTI- Records. The album is known to have been recorded as early as February 2011 and was officially announced for release on August 23, 2011 on Waits' official web site and various social media networks. On the same day, the title track, "Bad as Me," was released as the album's first single on iTunes. The album is Waits' first album consisting completely of new material in seven years since Real Gone (2004). Waits' label, ANTI-, recently agreed on a distribution deal with Warner Music Group allowing them to release the album internationally. This marks Waits' first release through the Warner organization since Heartattack and Vine (1980). Upon its release, Bad as Me received widespread critical acclaim.

On August 16, 2011, amid the rise of many rumours concerning Bad as Me, Waits announced on his official web site and through various social media outlets that he would "set the rumors straight" on August 23. On this date, the title track was released as a digital single through iTunes, a video with previews of the album was released on YouTube, and was followed by a press release on his site and ANTI-'s blog, which read:

    “Bad As Me is Tom Waits’ first studio album of all new music in seven years. This pivotal work refines the music that has come before and signals a new direction. Waits, in possibly the finest voice of his career, worked with a veteran team of gifted musicians and longtime co-writer/producer Kathleen Brennan. From the opening horn-fueled chug of “Chicago,” to the closing barroom chorale of “New Year’s Eve,” Bad As Me displays the full career range of Waits’ songwriting, from beautiful ballads like “Last Leaf,” to the avant cinematic soundscape of “Hell Broke Luce,” a battlefront dispatch. On tracks like “Talking at the Same Time,” Waits shows off a supple falsetto, while on blues burners like “Raised Right Men” and the gospel tinged “Satisfied” he spits, stutters and howls. Like a good boxer, these songs are lean and mean, with strong hooks and tight running times. A pervasive sense of players delighting in each other’s musical company brings a feeling of loose joy even to the album’s saddest songs.”

The album was made available to stream on October 17, 2011 and released digitally on iTunes on October 21, where it was previously available for pre-order. Domestic verions of the album were released worldwide on October 24, 2011 in three formats: a digipak CD version with a 32-page booklet and free digital download in FLAC, AAC or MP3; a deluxe edition two-CD version with 40-page booklet and free digital download; and a 180 gram LP and CD with a lyric sheet and free digital download.

Bad as Me was released to widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 89, based on 28 reviews, indicating "Universal Acclaim". Allmusic's Thom Jurek said that "Bad as Me is an aural portrait of all the places he's traveled as a recording artist, which is, in and of itself, illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable," awarding the album four out of five stars. Amanda Petrusich of Pitchfork Media noted that the album's "tracks are concise and expertly edited", adding that "Bad as Me feels as new as it does ancient," awarding the album 8.1/10. The Daily Telegraph praised the album's "rattling bawlers," adding that each were "distinctively turbocharged with reckless and richly textured energy," while also mentioning that the "ballads run poignantly on their rims, leaking emotion," and gave the album a five out of five star rating. Michael Wheeler, in his 9/10 review for Drowned in Sound, praised its "exhilarating, terrifying, heartbreaking, tear jerking, bone-rattling style," Andy Gill in The Independent praised the album for containing "no filler at all" and gave it top marks, while Noel Murray of The A.V. Club called it "Waits' embrace of a legacy that now includes enshrinement in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame," concluding that "for longtime fans it’s a fun reminder of Waits' ability to be a badass when necessary" before awarding the album a grade of A-. In The Guardian, Dave Simpson awarded the work a 5-star rating, called Waits's lyrics "as unpredictable and inspired as ever," while claiming his "songs hurtle past in waves of blistering energy and imagery." Rolling Stone's Will Hermes spoke highly of the album in four out of five star review, saying that it was Waits's "most sharply focused record since the game-changing tag team Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs decades ago." In a review for Slant Magazine, Jesse Cataldo gave the album four out of five stars, stating that Bad as Me was "a self-affirming collection of the things Waits attempts to represent," and, in an equally positive appraisal, Dan Weiss of Spin gave it 8/10 and said that the album "burns at fuse speed."

Wikipedia.org




Bad as Me is Tom Waits' first collection of new material in seven years. He and Kathleen Brennan - wife, co-songwriter, and production partner - have, at the latter's insistence, come up with a tight-knit collection of short tunes, the longest is just over four minutes. This is a quick, insistent, and woolly aural road trip full of compelling stops and starts. While he's kept his sonic experimentation - especially with percussion tracks - Waits has returned to blues, rockabilly, rhythm & blues, and jazz as source material. Instead of sprawl and squall, we get chug and choogle. For "Chicago" - via Clint Maedgen's saxes, Keith Richards' (who appears sporadically here) and Marc Ribot's guitars, son Casey Waits' drums, dad's banjo, percussion and piano, and Charlie Musselwhite's harmonica (he appears numerous times here, too) - we get a 21st century take on vintage R&B. Indeed, one can picture Big Joe Turner fronting this clattering rush of grit and groove, and this album is all about groove. Augie Meyers appears on Vox organ and Flea on bass to guide Waits' tablas and vocals on "Raised Right Men," a 12-bar stagger filled with delightful lyrical clichés from an America that has passed on into myth - Waits does nothing to de-mystify this; he just makes it greasy and danceable. The slow, spooky "Talking at the Same Time" is still in blues form albeit with ska-styled horns to make things more exotic, as Waits waxes about the current state of economic affairs. He showcases history's circular nature as he bridges our national narrative from 1929-1941, and up to the present day: "Well it’s hard times for some/For others it’s sweet/Someone makes money when there’s blood in the street...Well we bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit/We got the rind..." Rockabilly rears its head on "Get Lost," with David Hidalgo strutting a solid '50s guitar snarl above the horns. Dawn Harms' violin and Patrick Warren's keyboards add textural dimension to Hidalgo's and Ribot's arid guitars on the apocalyptic blues of "Face to the Highway," with Waits offering startling, contrasting images in gorgeous rhymes. This track, and the two proceeding ones - the forlorn carny ballad "Pay Me" and the wasted lover's plea in the West Texas mariachi of "Back in the Crowd" - set up the latter half of the record, where there are more hard-edged blues and rockers, such as the spiky stomping title track, the cracked guitar ramble in "Satisfied," and the clattering, percussive anti-war rant "Hell Broke Luce" (sic). Between each of these songs are ballads. In the jazzy nightclub blues of "Kiss Me" and the country-ish folk of "Last Leaf" lie lineage traces to Waits' earliest material: the latter features Richards in a delightfully ruined vocal duet. Indeed, even the set-closer "New Year's Eve," with Hidalgo's guitars and accordion in one of Waits' signature saloon songs, quotes from "Auld Lang Syne" in the song's waning moments to send the platter off on a bittersweet, nostalgic note, reminding the listener of Waits' use of "Waltzing Matilda" in "Tom Traubert's Blues" all those years ago. Brennan's instincts were dead-on: it was time for a set of brief, tightly written and arranged songs - something we haven't actually heard from Waits. Bad as Me is an aural portrait of all the places he's traveled as a recording artist, which is, in and of itself, illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable.

Thom Jurek - All Musioc Guide




Tom Waits : Bad As Me :: Review“All Aboard, All Aboard,” is the croaking cry of conductor Tom Waits as his train embarks for points unknown on the frenetic “Chicago,” which is taken from his ominously titled 17th album, Bad As Me.  The unyielding train that dominates the introduction of Bad As Me serves as a perfect metaphor for Waits’ musical trajectory because there’s never been anything resembling a straight path in his career.  Bad As Me is Waits’ first studio album in seven years since the junkyard auteur released Real Gone.  While Real Gone was notable for embracing a hip-hop aesthetic and appearing more concerned with political affairs, it displeased many a Waits fan because of the notable absence of a piano and co-opting of the urban style.

Waits’ fans should rejoice then, as Bad As Me marks a return to form for the iconic statesman as it appears that the piano playing strongly figures into the mix.   Bad As Me is also more guitar oriented than Real Gone as Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo and Keith Richards add their unique signatures to Waits’ ever-changing styles.  Keef plays on four tracks, Hidalgo on seven and Ribot’s angular tones supplement eleven of the tracks.  The racket that Waits’ troupe conjures on the tunes that he and his wife Kathleen Brennan have penned is mind-blowing and serves as an apt complement.

The themes that Waits and Brennan cover on Bad As Me include fresh starts, the ever-mandatory romantic (sentimental) numbers, assorted oddballs and politics.  The fresh starts are depicted on “Chicago,” “Get Lost” and the David Lynchian “Face To The Highway” which nails the existential dread that comes with moving on as Ribot’s and Hidalgo’s guitars gently lull you along to passivity.  The dreamlike tones they emulate with their guitars in this track are sublime.  “Get Lost” tackles the theme of a fresh start with more  machismo and causes a rave-up similar to Los Lobos’ “Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes.”

Waits’ bread and butter are his romantic numbers and like any solid Waits’ album, Bad As Me is rife with them. There’s the typical broken hearts, “Pay Me,” “Back in the Crowd”  and the coyly amorous piano and bass ballad, “Kiss Me” which harkens back to Waits’ 70’s output and could fit easily on “Heart of Saturday Night” or one of Bones Howe’s productions.  “Last Leaf” is a wonderful, sentimental duet with Keith Richards that is similar to “That Feel” and serves as an appropriate statement as the two rockers age gracefully.  The title track “Bad As Me” could also fit into this category although it’s obsessive nature might cast it as more in the vein of the next category, the oddball.

The oddball category exists theoretically for Waits to cast aside preconceptions and write about topics that could have been inspired from various archaic sources.  This is the side of Waits that most of the diehards from the 1970’s can do without as Waits comes off his rocker and successfully dives into the ditch or into a far reaching abyss without any hope of coming back unscathed.  “Raised Right Men” falls into this category containing one of Tom’s bizarre takes on etiquette.  The only track you might skip on Bad As Me is the Mick and Keef cajoling “Satisfied” which attempts to answer The Stones “Satisfaction.”  ”Satisfied” feels like a false start, the lyrics are half-baked and the band sounds like it needs a breather.  Waits’ “New Year’s Eve” is an appropriate fit for this category although it is more reflective than a typical odd track.  There’s an  interplay between “New Year’s Eve” and “Auld Lang Syne” that is perfect and serves to highlight the fractured tale of a party that has gone awry.

Waits’ meditations on social commentary and politics became more prominent on Real Gone and have expanded themselves on Bad As Me.  “Talking At The Same Time” sounds like an intentional twin to his “Heartattack and Vine” although its 30 years late.   The lyrical bent of “Talking At The Same Time” focuses the now traditional practice  of bailing out millionaires instead of an individual’s wild night out on the town.  Hey, both ideas kind of go hand in hand, if you’d like to make a connection there.  The  barking and stomping cadence of “Hell Broke Luce” references a soldier who is bitter about the commanding officers that have their asses stapled to their goddamned desks and it also marks the first time that Waits’ has specifically expressed his disgust with war since “Day After Tomorrow” from Real Gone.

It seems that no matter what your favorite Waits element is,  you’ll find that and more to admire on Bad As Me.   Bad As Me truly ranks among Tom Waits’ classic albums.

Greg on 15 October 2011
Featured Reviews



After an artist has 40 years of musical output, it can be pretty difficult to predict what their next project will sound like. Springsteen fans know they can expect the same songs played live, but when it comes to albums, it’s all guesswork, and Leonard Cohen fans will know this feeling next year when the 77 year-old Cohen will release Old Ideas. For the followers of Tom Waits, the unpredictability of his output is almost predictable. Waits has made a career out of making the sounds he wants, when he wants to make them, and Bad As Me serves as a clear example of the Waits method.

Although it has been seven years since Waits’ last album of all new material, the 61-year-old has stayed in the public eye with film roles (Domino), a b-sides collection ( Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards), and a live album (Glitter and Doom Live). Like Orphans…, Bad As Me finds Waits wearing many of the hats he wore during different phases of his career. The soft-souled troubadour (seen best on 1973′s “Ruby’s Arms”) is on display during “Back In The Crowd” and “New Year’s Ever.” The Rain Dogs-era’s frantic bandleader takes the reigns on “Get Lost” and “Chicago,” and the apocalyptic-harbinger Waits has hinted at in both his films and songs has never been better than on “Hell Broke Luce.”

Waits is heard in both soft-singing and Cookie Monster vocal modes on Bad As Me, which shows that he is one of the rare singers (along with Cohen and Elvis Costello) whose voice has aged well. As a man who always seemed to be a stand-in for everybody’s drunk Uncle, on Bad As Me Waits has fully embraced the bipolar switching between soft and frantic, good and bad, sane and insane, lost and found.

Jim Adair
The Philebrity/AKA Music Record Of The Week



Tom Waits may pay the mortgage as a musician, but he clearly has the heart of a junkman. With Waits, you get the sense that nothing ever truly gets thrown away—maybe pushed deeper back or buried beneath but never completely discarded or forgotten. On Bad As Me, Waits’ first collection of entirely new material since 2004’s clanging, scraping Real Gone, the once inebriated lounge act turned beatboxing junkman picks through the scrap metal and tire piles of his nearly 40-year career and shows that a shine can be salvaged from even the rustiest pieces.

The hard-times exodus “Chicago” chaotically chugs into the station on frantic Blood Money horns and in-and-out guitars, complete with a maniacal conductor’s “All aboard!” “Leave all we’ve ever known for a place we’ve never seen,” growls Waits, “maybe things will be better in Chicago.” It’s not much for a couple to pin their hopes on, but it’s about the best that most of the down-on-their-luck inhabitants of Bad As Me can scrounge up. Troubled times continue on the tiptoeing “Talking at the Same Time”, Waits delivering a grim outlook with a surprisingly smooth falsetto that never hints at cracking like on previous efforts. Swinging rocker “Get Lost” recycles the demented, hiccupping yelp of Orphans brawler “Lie to Me” on its playful calls for reckless abandon: “Time it don’t mean nothing/Money means even less/Don’t bring nothing, baby… I wanna go get lost.”

Listeners will be thankful that Waits largely avoids the guttural vocal excavations that grew tiresome on 2009’s Glitter and Doom Live. Here, he takes his fair turns at singing, as opposed to unearthing, and delivers some of his more satisfying softer moments in recent memory. David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) adds Spanish Tinge flourishes to the gorgeous whisper of a ballad “Back in the Crowd”, Waits’ low, rugged croon imbuing this lover’s plea to be loved or let go (“put back in the crowd”) with a tender frankness. Waits hasn’t delivered anything quite this accessible since “Hold On” off 1999’s Mule Variations. “Kiss Me” tickles the familiar “Blue Valentines” and “Burma-Shave” spots on the ivories behind a lover’s seductive imploring to “kiss me like a stranger once again.” There’s an “Alice”-like stillness in its instrumental details, and the opening image (“The fire’s dying out/All the embers have been spent”) perfectly captures the idea of a love that has lost its original glow.

It would hardly be a proper dig through Waits’ junkyard past without the requisite bangers and clangers that have been staples since 1983’s seminal Swordfishtrombones. The debauched lead single, “Bad As Me”, drives on the same brand of brash guitars, pounding percussion, and catalog-style lyrics (“You’re the head on the spear/You’re the nail on the cross/You’re the fly in my beer/You’re the key that got lost”) that fueled Mule Variations’ “Big in Japan”. The madcap, “Big Black Mariah”-esque romp of playfully titled “Satisfied” is made all the more delectable when you realize longtime friend Keith Richards is on guitar, the final punch line coming when Waits proclaims, “Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards will scratch where I’ve been itching.” In a more serious vein pumps the jarring, wartime march of “Hell Broke Luce”. From the echoed, barked orders of “left, right, left” to the sampled sounds of machine gun fire, it’s a psychotic, nightmarish stomp and the most affecting political statement Waits has made since 1983’s soft-spoken “Soldier’s Things”.

Other notable tracks find Waits, or his characters, feeling the cool chill of life’s autumn and contemplating the changes to come. Waits is joined by Richards on the choruses of the spare, delicate ballad “Last Leaf”, each sounding exceedingly frail as they sing about the ambivalence of being that final leaf to fall from a tree. While there is the thankfulness for having lasted so long, at the same time, there is a loneliness and sense of having been forgotten as others have come and gone. Waits’ bare and ragged voice waltzes with Franks-era accordion on “Pay Me”, the tale of an old-time stage performer who considers life’s final act: “And I’ll wear boots instead of high heels/And the next stage that I am on, it will have wheels.” Part of what Waits has always done is shine a light—be it a stage light, street lamp, or neon sign—on those, like this aging performer, who we might otherwise pass over without a second thought. Yes, we like to “stomp, whistle, and scream” and “dance with a soldier’s glee” (whatever that entails exactly), but Waits also knows that we need to cry in our beer, howl at the moon, and occasionally have our lives dignified by a stranger sparing a moment to listen to our sad stories.

Going back to the well is generally frowned upon, but given the depth of Waits’ well and the crispness and vitality drawn from it on Bad As Me, it hardly seems to warrant criticism that he has chosen to rummage through his past and revisit what he never had the heart, or mind, to throw away. Waits will always find different ways to bang on the same old thing or new ways to tell a familiar story. Bad As Me begins on a train and ends in a bar on New Year’s Eve. I’ll gladly take that journey with Tom Waits every time.

Matt Melis on October 24th, 2011
© 2007-2011 Consequence of Sound



Back when The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus' expansive treatise on Bob Dylan's 1967 collaboration with the Band, was first published in hardcover in 1997 (the same year, incidentally, that Smithsonian Folkways reissued Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music), it was called Invisible Republic. It was an apt, even poignant title that still never managed to evoke half the wistfulness its paperback replacement did. Marcus' disciples quickly rallied around the new phrase, adopting it as a kind of credo, a genre, and an aspirational aesthetic that owed as much to Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac as it did to Charley Patton and the Carter Family. And while collective cultural nostalgia (for times real or imagined) has become part of the zeitgeist, longing for a dusty and peculiar past - for the misbegotten and the unfussed-with, the archaic and the odd - isn't a particularly new phenomenon. Marcus sought and found those things in pre-war vernacular American music, in the songs Smith culled from his crates of 78s and gathered under a Celestial Monochord. Tom Waits hears them everywhere.

Bad as Me is Waits' first proper collection of studio material since 2004's Real Gone (in 2006, he released Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, a 3xCD mélange of lost-and-found tracks). He's backed by a cabal of familiar, gnarly-faced noisemakers (David Hildalgo, longtime bandleader Marc Ribot, Keith Richards, Flea), and again shares writing and producing credit with his wife and frequent collaborator Kathleen Brennan. Waits' jerky grandpa bark, which he'd honed and perfected by his mid-twenties, was reverse-engineered to age well. Now, perhaps freed from the burden of approximation, he sounds especially wild and gleeful, hollering with deranged aplomb. Bad as Me is as essential - and as essentially weird - as anything he's done before.

Bad as Me comprises mostly love songs: paeans to lasting love, the kind that changes and bends. Even when Waits is yearning for freedom, as he does on the drunk and twitchy "Get Lost", he still wants his longtime girl by his side. "When you wear that real tight sweater/ You know I can't resist/ It's been that way forever baby/ Ever since we kissed," he croons, his voice raw and giddy; he sounds like a guy who was pummeled by a car, got up, staggered off, and started singing. On the title track, over piano, baritone sax, and spastic guitar stabs, he celebrates mutual failure ("You're mother superior in only a bra/ You're the same kind of bad as me"), positioning compatible sin as its own triumph over circumstance. Elsewhere, he adheres to old-fashioned ideals about the "power of a good woman's love," lamenting, as he does on the ramshackle "Raised Right Men", the ways in which imperfect husbands ("Gunplay Maxwell and Flat Nose George, Ice Pick Ed Newcomb") routinely fail their partners.

None of this is particularly new lyrical or musical fodder for Waits, and, nearly 20 records in, he's clearly locked into a formula - however atypical, however idiosyncratic - he's not particularly keen to abandon (read enough interviews, and you'll also see him trotting out the same stock punchlines - and you'll still laugh). Still, he does push his voice here, and to wildly gratifying ends. On "Talking at the Same Time", a woozy, horn-accented shuffle (it evokes Ennio Morricone, David Lynch, Alice in Wonderland), he adopts a soft, wheezing falsetto, while on "Pay Me", he sounds docile and sleepy, like he's singing from bed (it's a heartbreaking choice for a track that contains the admission, "They pay me not to come home").

As with any Tom Waits album, there are a few absurd affectations at work, both on record and off (in a recent New York Times profile, Waits is caught driving a black Suburban with a newspaper announcing the inauguration of John F. Kennedy spread across the passenger seat) but there's enough variation here that all that oldness and weirdness - all those frantic, busted melodies, all that carnie growl, all those sarsaparilla bottles banging around the backseat - never gets tiresome. For all his indulgences, Waits never lingers too long; these tracks are concise and expertly edited, and Bad as Me feels as new as it does ancient.

Amanda Petrusich; October 24, 2011
© 2011 Pitchfork Media Inc.



Tom Waits' new album 'Bad As Me' will be out on October 24th, but since Monday you can stream the whole thing, as ‘a private listening party’ after the request of a code.
You just have to go there: http://badasme.com. Although codes were given out to those already on Waits mailing list, if you enter your email address you will eventually get one, as I did.

This is Tom Wait's first studio album of all new music in seven years, and needless to say it is highly anticipated. At the first listening, it is your usual, familiar Waits’ creepy universe, alternating between panicked vocals over bluesy guitars and jazzy trumpets (‘Get Lost’), slow film-noir-soundtrack-numbers ('Talking at the same time'), drunken ballads over melancholic accordions (‘Pay me’, ‘Last Leaf’), and piano bar smoky ambiances (‘Kiss me’).

‘Back in the Crowd’ is a beautiful ballad with gorgeous Spanish guitars and Waits’ desperate vocals, actually his voice is never the same from one track to another, from deep harsh graveling howl to high falsetto moan.

Waits plays his typical, scratchy-voiced-mad-preacher screaming and freaking out over weird percussion and broken rhythms (‘Chicago’, ‘Satisfied’) and even Cuban guitars (‘Bad As Me’), a prophet from hell telling terrible things over a circus-atmosphere of syncopated beats, war-army-like (‘Hell Broke Luce’ depicting dark humor scenes like ‘My mom she died and never wrote/We sat by the fire and ate a goat’)

It’s sad then explosive, loud then intimate, with some abrupt transitions from song to song, and a total resilience even in the saddest moments ‘I’m the last leaf on the tree/The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me’, he sings in ‘Last Leaf’.

And yes you may have already heard this strange use of sax and harmonica if you have listened to Tom Waits, but everything sounds new. There is even the risky use of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the end of the last song ‘New Year’s Eve’, but it works as only Waits could get away with this sort of trick. One last thing, there are a bunch of famous musicians playing, Marc Ribot, Charlie Musselwhite, David Hildalgo, Flea and even Keith Richards!

Alyson Camus - RockNYC
Wednesday, 19 October 2011 00:14



"With my coat and my hat/I say goodbye to all that," snarls Tom Waits on "Chicago," hopping a train rhythm of horns, harmonica, banjo and electric guitars. The opener of his latest set is a classic American narrative: a hard-luck case setting out for a better life. But this is 2011, the world bled by Wall Street, and things are fucked everywhere. Dude is hoping against hope, but no one - himself included - expects this to end well.

Braying and crooning in Salvation Army finery like a visitor from our last Depression, Bad as Me riffs on money, jobs and bosses; also love, war and unending struggle as the norm. It's no big departure for a 61-year-old singer-songwriter who has been representing as a skid-row bard since his twenties. But it plays to the moment as Waits refines his prickly brand of time travel. It might also be his most broadly emotional set ever; certainly it's his most sharply focused record since the game-changing tag team Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs decades ago.

At its heart are electric guitars. Marc Ribot's jagged, Cuban-tinged riffs have helped define Waits' sound since the 1980s. Keith Richards and David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) bring their own takes on American roots music - Richards (who plays on four cuts) with slurred Chuck Berry licks, Hidalgo with corrido-style blues. Bassists Flea and Les Claypool add angular funk, while a circus trailer of other ace musicians tumbles across the stage.

But Waits' voice is the star - that weird instrument that can seem like shtick on first blush but turns out to be as emotionally true an exaggeration as Thom Yorke's falsetto. His high register is heartbreaking on the grim ballad "Talking at the Same Time," ditto his tenor croon on the epigrammatic "Pay Me" ("The only way down from the gallows is to swing"). And his phlegmy bark destroys everything in its path on "Hell Broke Luce," a tale told in military-chant cadence over Richards' and Ribot's strafing guitars, New Orleans funeral brass and gunfire. "I lost my buddy and I wept, wept," Waits' damaged soldier shouts above the din. "I come down from the meth/So I slept, slept." It's a devastating song, as powerful as anything he's done.

There are moments where shtick gets the better of him. See "Satisfied," a juke-joint rejoinder to the Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," whose narrator addresses "Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards" while Mr. Richards riffs along. Who could resist? Waits is an artist, but he understands - as he confessed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony last year - that he's also in showbiz. It may be a dodgy business. But it doesn't get much better than this.

Will Hermes - October 25, 2011
www.rollingstone.com



Throughout his career, Tom Waits has created milestone albums that serve both to refine the music that has come before, and to signal a new phase in his career: Rain Dogs and Mule Variations are both counted by fans as among these pivotal works. Now comes Bad As Me, his first studio album of all new music in seven years, which finds Tom Waits in possibly the finest voice of his career and at the height of his songwriting powers, working with a veteran team of gifted musicians and longtime co-writer/producer Kathleen Brennan. From the opening horn-fueled chug of “Chicago,” to the closing barroom chorale of “New Year’s Eve,” Bad As Me displays the full career range of Waits’ songwriting, from beautiful ballads like “Last Leaf,” to the avant cinematic soundscape of “Hell Broke Luce,” a battlefront dispatch. On tracks like “Talking at the Same Time,” Waits shows off a supple falsetto, while on blues burners like “Raised Right Men” and the gospel tinged “Satisfied” he spits, stutters and howls. Like a good boxer, these songs are lean and mean, with strong hooks and tight running times. And there is a pervasive sense of players delighting in each other’s musical company that brings a feeling of loose joy even to the album’s saddest songs. Bad As Me is a Tom Waits album for the ages.

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