Aural Fixations

TOM WAITS
Alice
Blood Money
(Anti-)
The release of a new Tom Waits album is always cause for celebration. While never more than a cult favorite as far as the general public is concerned, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more respected artist among musicians and listeners who look outside the mainstream. His constant stride towards new and unique musical territories, regardless of which way the winds of commercial fortune blow, has made him a hero to iconoclasts everywhere. He was silent for much of the nineties, beginning the decade with the Grammy-nominated aural nightmares Bone Machine and The Black Rider, possibly his most daring and imaginative works, and ending it with Mule Variations, an album that broke little new ground but instead consolidated his many approaches onto a single disk.

Three years after that album and its subsequent triumphant tour, Waits returns to the racks with not one but two new records. Both Alice and Blood Money consist of music created with his wife Kathleen Brennan for theater productions conducted by his friend Robert Wilson, his collaborator on The Black Rider. As with Mule Variations, neither album stretches the Waits sound in any particularly new directions. But, like that near-masterpiece, both of these records show off his strengths to excellent effect.

Sometimes referred to as the lost Waits masterpiece, Alice was originally performed as an "avant-garde opera" and directed by Wilson in Hamburg in 1992. The story is loosely based on author Lewis Carroll's alleged obsession with Alice Liddell, the supposed inspiration for his most famous work. There's little in the songs themselves that ties them together into a coherent narrative, but it doesn't really matter. What does matter is the quality of the tracks themselves, and, fortunately, it's quite high. Alice leans most heavily on Waits' distinctive style of cabaret ballad, cigarette-stained and uncomfortable in bright light, mixed with heartbreak and chased by faded dreams. There are a few of his patented noise-ridden paeans to dementia; "We're All Mad Here," "Everything You Can Think" and the ranting "Kommienezuspadt," with their skewed rhythms, unconventional instrumentation and Waits' feral growl, could easily fit on any of his 80s albums. But most of the record is very much like his 70s work. "Fish & Bird" and "I'm Still Here" make resigned pleas for love to bloom again. "Table Top Joe" and "Poor Edward" tell stories of freaks and their attempts at life among the so-called normals. The alienation in "No One Knows I'm Here" and "Lost In the Harbour" slowly fades into despair. The title track recounts the protagonist's desire for Alice over a jazzy melody Billie Holiday would have been proud to sing. A string section, Colin Stetson's lush saxophone and Waits' own barroom piano form the basic canvas on which the songwriter paints his colors, giving the record a cozy, almost intimate atmosphere. Alice hides the dark heart of a misfit inside the smartly-adorned figure of a vaudeville singer. (more)

Refreshed

UNCLE TUPELO
89/93: An Anthology
(Columbia/Legacy)
Sony Legacy opens its forthcoming reissue program for Uncle Tupelo with 89/93: An Anthology, a single disk retrospective that samples the band's four albums and adds tracks from singles, compilations and demos. Uncle Tupelo is, of course, the shot heard 'round the world as far as so-called alternative country is concerned. While the Belleville trio was hardly the first combine C&W with rock (see also: Jason & the Scorchers, the Long Ryders, the Flying Burrito Brothers, etc.), its first album No Depression hit at just the right time (1990), producing the earnest strains of American roots music into what was already becoming a staid, formulaic rock underground. Songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy can be credited with not only reconnecting the American underground with its roots, but also reintroducing the idea that postpunk rock need not be steeped in layers of irony to be effective. The lasting legacy of the alt.country movement will be less its actual sound than its reassertion of the song itself being the most important element of music, and Uncle Tupelo was the point band for that. We owe them a great deal. (more)

Album reviews of new music by:

The Beatifics

Singer/songwriter Chris Dorn leads the Beatifics in Minneapolis, a city known for its quality power pop. Dorn's ensemble is no exception to that rule, as this neat little 5-song EP demonstrates. (more)

Mark Eitzel

Music For Courage & Confidence is no substitute for a batch of original Eitzel songs, but it's still its own kind of artistic statement. (more)

Halfway to Gone

Though it hails from New Jersey, this muck-encrusted power trio behaves as if it just rose up from the swamp, moonshine in hand. (more)

Hayseed Dixie

The real story here is how even the hoariest classic rock dinosaurs can get a new lease on life through the magic of mountain music. (more)

Jacintha

It's not that often that a performer is really all that his or her press material claims. On Jacintha's third CD, though, she lives up to the hype. (more)

Mary Lou Lord

There are those who would argue that this simple solo acoustic presentation is the way she's meant to be heard. Regardless of whether you're pro- or anti-studio production for Lord, you'll find much to enjoy here. (more)

Rain Fell Within

The Virginia sextet incorporates heavy metal riffing, classically-inclined keyboard arrangements, misty Goth atmospherics and operatically trained soprano vocals into songs that compare love's dissolution to universal apocalypse. (more)