TOM WAITS
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards
Anti
· With 54 songs on three discs, Orphans is about as close as Waits will likely come to a definitive statement.
Tom Waits is the type of artist who can only be described in contradictions. He is a junkyard Nikola Tesla, a juke-joint Sinatra. Musically, he can be a carnival barker leading a shambling, skeletal marching band, or a piano man on the wrong side of the tracks, shouting salvation with a voice more broken than the beer bottles shattered in the alley out back.
Though Orphans began life as a collection of Waits’ B-sides and soundtrack work, something in the process of compilation inspired him, and the album snowballed into a three-disc set of two dozen previously recorded songs and 30 brand new ones. The first disc, Brawlers, features Waits’ more guitar-based, bluesy numbers. Bawlers holds the ballads and Bastards holds the rest – the spoken word and the Brechtian nightmares.
Easily the most straightforward of the three discs, and also the weakest, Brawlers still manages to cover The Ramones and Leadbelly with the same ease. Waits’ horrorshow voice adds excitement even to the relatively unadorned rockabilly of opener "Lie to Me," but he’s at his best when he’s crafting a mythology of derelicts – see "Fish in the Jailhouse," where a convict escapes prison with a fishbone scavenged from the cafeteria. The standout is "Road to Peace," a tale from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that’s so devoid of poetics it sounds like it could have been read straight from a CNN ticker.
Bawlers showcases the off-kilter beauty in Waits’ music – longtime fans frustrated by the lack of piano ballads on 2004’s Real Gone will find a lot to love here. Oddly enough, Bawlers also features a Leadbelly and a Ramones cover, the latter a version of "Danny Says," so prettily fragile as to be unrecognizable.
And Bastards, despite its positioning as the most experimental of the three discs, is still surprisingly accessible. Twisted children’s stories and macabre biology lessons share space with classic Americana like Kerouac and the seven dwarves. Of all the discs, Brawlers shows the odds ’n’ sods nature of Orphans’s origins the most, but it shows it proudly and manages its own sort of cohesion.
Waits has always been the kind of musician whose work couldn’t be contained on a single album – there’s never been an apt starting point for those looking to get into his catalogue. Until Orphans, that is. No question, Orphans is overwhelmingly long, varied to the point of absurdity and probably impossible to consume in a single sitting. In other words, it’s pretty much perfect.
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