The only problem with writing about any new Tom Waits record is the man himself describes his own work so accurately that any further attempts at conceptualism are rendered superfluous. Throughout the last 20 years he has variously tagged his songs as exercises in surruralism or Wreck Collections – this time out it’s Cubist Funk. With a little help from his son Casey on the decks, and a lot from his wife Kathleen Brennan, Waits has eschewed the vacuum-packed precision of computerised loops in favour of his own internal rhythm combustion engine, generating distorted human beatbox sounds with lungs, tongue and teeth in real time (no sampling four bars and repeating ad infinitum here buster).
This is filthy music. Tracks like ‘Clang Boom Steam’ hypothesise what would happen if the grumpy old troll who lives under the bridge came out to play with JB’s all-stars. ‘Metropolitan Glide’ is more skip rope than hip-hop, replacing bling-bling with prison slang. The bullwhip groove of ‘Don’t Go Into That Barn’ could be Beefheart doing ‘Who Do You Love’, while ‘Shake It’ transcribes the notes of dirty old men like Howlin’ Wolf or Willie Dixon on the commode after a rough night at the inn. Best of all is a furious psalm called ‘Make It Rain’, which backs up John Edgar Wideman’s assertion in his writing about the poetry of Sterling Plumpp that “blues announces the end of the world”.
So, Uncle Tom is still pursuing primitivism as pilgrim’s progress. Real Gone is built from sounds that seem to originate from before the dawn of music – or beyond its extinction. The clack of wooden slats, stress metal clang, chain gang call and response, field hollers and boot camp chants, these are a few of his favourite things. Waits once told Jim Jarmusch that his earliest memory was of seeing a pirate deathship on a beach in Mexico. Here he has re-envisioned those phantasms in a piece called ‘Hoist That Rag’, conjuring opium dreams of high seas terrorists boarding Bosch’s ship of the foolish and the mad, visions of frigging in the rigging, rotting cadavers hanging from the mast, mutineers hauled by ropes under the barnacled hull.
Real Gone also boasts a few new developments. There’s the return of the brilliant Marc Ribot on guitar, a key player in Tom’s rebirth as trashcan man in the mid-80s. On ‘Sins Of My Father’ he’s conceived a sort of Pentecostal ghost dub symphony over ten minutes, a dose of the neo-tropicalism practiced by the artist Jack Rathbone in Patrick McGrath’s novel Port Mungo. But also, there are the required mortality ballads like ‘How’s It Gonna End’ (Brecht and Weill’s ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive’ by way of a banjo-playing William Blake) and the Ophelia elegy ‘Dead And Lovely’. And of course, he’s still acting as prospector of lost etymologies, shoehorning words into songs no one else will touch (turnips anyone?).
Just when you think he’s flying too close to self parody – ‘Circus’ is his latest riff on pickled punks and carny folk – he’ll hiss a line like, “Dr Smith slipped me a preparation” that makes you realise no one else has managed to make brothers of Burroughs and Barnum.
When the world turns indifferent to art, the true artist’s response is to dream up a weirder one. Waits’ world it isn’t exactly a tourist trap, but once you go there you don’t want to come back. And then you’re real, real gone.