Alice/Blood Money

You wait half a decade for a new Tom Waits album and then two come along at the same time. Alice and Blood Money are Siamese twinsets written by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan for a stage production directed by Texan image alchemist Robert Wilson.

Age before beauty, beauty before blood, Alice dates back to 1992, a dream sequence of songs based around Lewis Carroll’s fixation on a young girl called Alice Liddell (of Wonderland and Looking Glass legend). The sound lurches from cocktail jazz – if the cocktail’s ingredients included absinthe, opium, laudanum and poitin – to buzz-cut Brecht.

Waits crosscuts between images of an ageing, aching Humbert Humbert, gazing through a rainy window at teardrop images of his Thumbelina Lolita to lurching down the Reeperbahn arm in arm with Lotte Lenya and Marlene Dietrich.

Customised and invented instruments jockey for position in a mixed pitch halfway between chamberpot opera and bawdy house blues while the words drip forbidden urges (the title tune, ‘Lost In The Harbour’). The word bizarre has become so overused, it’s bleached of all meaning, but Tom Wait’s is the man to put the blood back in it, like a doctor using backward leeches.

Alice also finds room to accommodate freaks of nature like Poor Edward, born with a woman’s face on the back of his head and who solves his deformity with suicide and Table Top Joe, a piano-playing human hand. Here Waits prospects for lost phrases that have slipped down the cracks between etymology and anthropology – pitchforks, strangled vines, balcony irons.

Check out the fatalistic refrain of ‘We’re All Mad Here’: “All the worms they will climb the rugged ladder of your spine”. Alice lives in the grey areas between degenerate love and benign madness.

On the other hand there’s a fist. Blood Money contains songs from Wilson’s adaptation of German poet George Buchner’s 1837 play Woyzeck. It deals with what Waits calls “the human meat wheel”, the base metals and minerals of the heart, loins, lungs, liver, spleen and of course the dirtiest part of the body – the mind. It sounds like he’s giving the human soul a root canal.

Song titles are pessimistic epigrams invented by the good lord’s bad consicence: ‘God’s Away On Business’, ‘Misery’s The River Of The World’, ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’, all SOS signals from a Jesus-less landscape.

Again Brecht and Weill are echoed (“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man”) over a weird-familiar fairground panoply of poisonous marimba, harumphing baritone sax, accordion, talliope, plus a battery of percussion instruments that sound like they were obtained at some horrible car-boot body part sale on the black economy.

There are many love songs of course, ‘Coney Island Baby’, ‘Lullaby’ but these serve only to highlight the red and the black. Blood Money sketches a society run on lust, love, revenge, greed and raw dishonest labour (“Digging up the dead with a shovel and a pick/It’s a job.”)

So the carnival rolls into town one more time and Waits sets out his stall, a hall of distorted mirrors that reflects the human species stripped of its skin. The view isn’t pretty but it’s true. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.