The Black Rider

JIM ROSE, if I were you I’d be, like, outta here. There’s a new freakshow in town and it’s not here for your amusement. It’s here for your soul.

The ringmaster wears a cheap black suit and a permanent grin you don’t have to be told not to trust. He turns to look at you as he pats the dust off his jacket but you daren’t meet his gaze. suddenly he purses his raw and cracked lips and gives a shrill whistle that hurts your ears like winter cold.

Despite yourself, you raise your trembling head to meet his eyes. But he’s not calling for your attention. From behind one of the paintbare trucks, a wizened old man appears and, aided by a jewel-encrusted walking stick, he slowly walks towards the whistler. You can hear his troubled breath from where you stand in the dying sun.

The ringmaster whispers to him and the old man doubles up in laughter, cackling horribly. Suddenly you realise that they’re both staring intently at you. Liquid warmth dribbles down your leg. You’re terrified. Shamefaced and blinking back hot tears you force yourself to meet their evil glare. It’s then that you recognise them. It’s Tom Waits and William Burroughs. You shit your intestines.

The Black Rider is Waits’ strangest album yet and also possibly his strongest. An operatic soundtrack that also works as a concept album, it’s the score from the Robert Wilson/Thalia Theatre of Hamburg’s stage production of The Black Rider, an old German folk tale about a luckless Romeo’s pact with Old Nick (darker than the Cave variety) and its inevitable tragic outcome.

Seeing as the pact in question involves “magic bullets” and the accidental shooting of a fresh bride, it comes as no surprise that William Burroughs wrote most of the lyrics, perhaps in an attempt to exorcise his own personal demons. In the extensive sleevenotes Waits details the experimental nature of the recording (most of the musicians who play on the album were picked up off the street corners and railway stations of Hamburg) and equates it to “something like a beautiful train wreck”.

Certainly, with Waits’ gravelly screams, the old man drawl of William Burroughs, and the insane bone-rattling percussion of The Devils Rhubarto Band, it is a wreck albeit a wonderfully sculpted one. Like a stinging Francis Bacon canvas.

From the distorted screaming of the ‘Lucky Day’ overture, through the slow melancholy of the haunting ‘November’, the album cuts its path to the black heart of the nightmare. It’s a fantasy sure, like fireside ghost stories but even the most hardened of listeners will have their spines chilled to the sound of Burroughs singing(?) “When you hear sweet syncopation/And the music softly moans/T’aint no sin to take off your skin/and dance around in your bones” like the Devil himself in your ear. This is perhaps his most successful collaboration to date, his previous mergers with Nirvana and the Disposable Heroes positively paling in comparison (along with the rest of us).

Even the love songs, like the haunting “I’ll Shoot The Moon” have an air of inevitable tragedy about them. Waits’ tired and mourning voice reiterates the dark tale against a backdrop of sampled mood-setters e.g. croaking bullfrogs and angry stormy skies. At other times, the music speaks for itself, as in the wildly stomping “Russian Dance”. There’s always an element of danger though.

You have been warned. Scooby-Doo this ain’t. Worth waiting for.

• Olaf Tyaransen