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.

Blood Money consists of music for Wilson's 2000 staging of Georg Buchner's 1837 sociopolitical play Woyzeck and is far less romantic than its companion. "If there's one thing you can say about mankind/There's nothing kind about man," Waits gruffly barks in the album opener "Misery is the River of the World," and the tune's lurching, marimba-driven rhythm and cynical sentiments pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the record. The fractured bossa nova come-on "Everything Goes to Hell" states "I don't believe you go to heaven when you're good/Everything goes to hell anyway." The creepy protagonist of "Another Man's Vine" plans to pluck the rose of a sojourning sailor from his garden. The speaker in "Starving in the Belly of a Whale" rants his woes (and sidesteps personal responsibility for them) like a drunken Baptist preacher. The sardonic adult nursery rhyme "God's Away on Business" sounds like a long-lost track from 1983's breakthrough Swordfishtrombones. Waits' characters still look for love in such a graying landscape, of course, and the ballads "Coney Island Baby" and "All the World is Green" gently testify to the search for meaning in piles of wreckage. The calliope-garnished waltz "A Good Man is Hard to Find" closes the record in a whiskey-scented cloud of ambivalence. On Blood Money it's as if the misfit from Alice simply no longer bothers to fix his tie or press his suit; there's no longer any point.

More discriminating critics may complain about the lack of anything truly new on these records. After all, there's no ground on either of them that Waits hasn't covered before, either musically or thematically. But that seems like nitpicking. With the exception of a few pale imitators, no one else in the contemporary music universe makes records like these; no one else would have the casually demented imagination or extemporaneous guts. Tom Waits balances avant-garde theatrics and browbeaten sentimentality like no one else; we should be thankful when he shares his unique vision, regardless of whether or not he's meted it out to us before. Michael Toland

For fans of: Brecht/Weill, Nick Cave, Stan Ridgway