5/5: The final segment of Tom Waits' excellent Orphans whisks listeners through a diverse collection of the songwriter's take on Kerouac, Bukowski and traditional songs.
Part 3 of Tom Waits’ recently released compendium is aptly entitled “Bastards,” and includes a collection of obscure covers, literature set to music, and original spoken-word pieces. The overall effect is a labyrinthine journey through the legend’s personal Never-Never Land.
From the nightmarish version of Snow White’s “Heigh Ho” to the devastatingly beautiful rendition of “Nirvana” by Charles Bukowski, this disc is purported to be those songs that never found proper homes within the Waits catalogue. However, this distinction is slightly misleading.
While the other two discs are held together by their musical genre (blues on “Brawlers” and ballads on “Bawlers”), the common thread on “Bastards” is strictly thematic. Track after track, the record treats listeners to a myriad of visions of hell or paradise or both.
In the hilarious spoken word piece “The Pontiac,” it is the singer’s impression of his father-in-law’s euphoric and nostalgic love of cars. “Home I’ll Never Be”—written by Jack Kerouac and set to music by Waits—celebrates the comfort to be found in a lack of home and the resulting state of constant wandering. On this cut and elsewhere, the fingerprints of the Beat Generation are all over this record.
More than one vision of Armageddon appears on this disc as well. With classic Waits magic, however, the singer simultaneously reveals the terrifying chaos and the eerie stillness of Time’s final moments. The album features haunting interpretations of Bertolt Brecht’s “What Keeps Man Alive” and Georg Buchner’s tale “Children’s Story” as examples.
This final segment, however, is not without more traditional fare. Alexander Lee Spence’s “Book of Moses” and the traditional “Two Sisters” testify to Waits’ unrivaled ability to unearth strange gems, clean them off with his own interpretation, and then leave them for us to admire their sparkling brilliance.
It is easy to slip into hyperbole when writing about music, and Waits’ innovative, consistently superior talent inspires more of this type of praise than usual. However, an album as masterful as Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards permits a certain amount of poetic license because, at the very least, it deserves nothing less than a critic’s best efforts in his or her attempts to capture what makes this record a truly unique work of art.
It is a collection that challenges, surprises, curses, blesses and generally impresses. All in all, it represents one of the finest contributions Waits has made not only to his own oeuvre, but to music at large.
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