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!
Tracklist:
01. Chicago
02. Raised Right Men
03. Talking At The Same Time
04. Get Lost
05. Face To The Highway
06. Pay Me
07. Back In The Crowd
08. Bad As Me
09. Kiss Me
10. Satisfied
11. Last Leaf
12. Hell Broke Luce
13. New Year's Eve