Customer Reviews

Blood Money

5 star:		(58)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"Blood Money" or "Alice" Hmmmm. Well I liked "Blood Money" better, but if you caught me in a melancholy mood I might prefer "Alice" instead. "Blood Money" shows off Tom Waits's strengths as a writer and composer (and heck, yeah, a singer!) All I got from my girlfriend was, "You can't really listen to this and enjoy it can you?" Well certainly. If you like your music world weary and forlorn, "Blood Money" and Tom Waits are right on target. "If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man." To me, that's right on target in "Misery Is The River Of The World" and hey, why not follow it up with "Everything Goes To Hell", "God's Away On Business", "Another Man's Vine", "Knife Chase" and "Starving In The Belly Of The Whale" for added pleasure. Waits is never afraid to take a keen look into the soul of man, and here he finds deceit, dishonesty, longing, depression, jealousy, regret. Musically, "Blood Money" is a mixture of jazz/blues/ragtime--the kind of stuff you'd hear in a smokey bar after hours. I liked "Blood Money" so much, that I'd put it up there with "Bone Machine", "Swordfishtrombones", "Rain Dogs", "Frank's Wild Years", "Small Change" and "Closing Time". If you are a Waits fan, this should easily satisfy.

It's no secret that Tom Waits isn't just an artist that deserves his own category; indeed, he deserves about four categories. There will always be disagreements among fans as to his best period. Personally, I still cling to the Island years, but that decision was solidified only after I had listened to "Small Change" and "The Heart of Saturday Night" about 70-80 thousand times while driving though Virginia and Illinois. Recently, the early troubadour albums have been in more frequent rotation. Enough about all that. The point being, I'm sure there is room for argument as regards these two albums, but contrary to another reviewer, I would have to go with "Blood Money". Like everyone else (I would guess) I bought these two simultaneously and (now I won't suppose this is unanimous) found "Alice" with its subtlety, beauty, and arguably better lyrics to be superior. After about two listens, my mind changed... and after quite a few more, I would recommend "Blood Money" if you've just now set aside enough money to buy one CD (I can't see anyone judging a fan if it came down to this and a fifth of Ballantines.) To qualify, though, this recommendation may only apply to Island years stalwarts... but "Alice" won't remind anyone of Asylum releases. Naturally, this is only the case if a choice has to be made. Both albums are phenomenal compared to anyone else, and quite good in Waits terms. "Blood Money" though, is just so sublimely manic and murderous that I can't see anyone not loving it. Two notes of musical interest - Cut 7 "Knife Chase" is probably the nicest instrumental since the "Night on Earth" soundtrack, and if I haven't lost it, I swear that the ending to "Coney Island Baby" has about four piano chords that will remind you of the first time you heard "Frank's Wild Years."

Tom Waits is a man of many voices and on Blood Money he summons the un-usual cast of characters. He is typically at his tenderest in a waltz, but on this album pessimism and depression pervade. There are waltzes but he uses them in a different fashion, from the sinister carousel-from-hell interlude in the opening track to the denial of tenderness in Another Man's Vine and The Part You Throw Away. There is depth here and I find more with each listening. Here is a distillation of the songs:

Misery Is The River Of The World - After six shots of tequila, the Cookie Monster vents about 25 years with someone's hand up his a**.

Everything Goes To Hell - What a different movie Aladdin would be if Jafar sang the opening title.

Coney Island Baby - A simple love song about the girl of one's dreams... literally.

All The World Is Green - What good is all this beauty around your gravestone, dear?

God's Away On Business - Jimmy Durante as a jaded, syphilitic Pangloss.

Another Man's Vine - Scornful coveting by an embittered have-not.

Knife Chase (Instrumental) - Trapped in a house of mirrors and the lights go out... who's there?

Lullaby - One of Waits' tenderest melodies. Shut out the bleak waking world, child.

Starving In The Belly Of A Whale - It's Rawhide with a Marine drill instructor exhorting the wagon train onward with his customary compassion.

The Part You Throw Away - Life... what a waste.

Woe - At first glance this is a sweet love song about going out dancing with your girl. But, whoa, the title and the dirge-like tempo turn it into something else. Is this a bereaved old man at the open casket of his late wife?

Calliope (Instrumental) - Disturbing bed-spins between inebriation and unconsciousness.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find - If Billie Holiday were alive today she'd be 90 and croaking her way through this jaunty number.

chilling, soul tingling tales of love, lust, loss, and languish.

That haunting, smoky, philosophy spinning voice is one of the most savory products this strange universe has spawned. There are things in life that can be highly enjoyable: beer drinking, pipe smoking, and listening to Tom Waits are pleasures that come to mind.

I find Tom Waits a pleasure on days when the sky is blue and the the sun is shining bright. Birds do not whistle as beautifully as Waits.

These are deep, thoughtful tunes that make you think and feel. Poetry set to the beat of time, Waits stirs the heart and brings you into realms of far away places where the women are so beautiful you can taste it and scenery is always doing something for you.

Hearts may be broken while dark shadows and pain are just around the corner - but somehow through it all love endures and permeates it all. Tom Waits is always there with that indomitable cynical grin and his hands on the perfect keys.

Soothing melodies and mischievous, insightful lyrics reveal the mad genius of Waits, rendered as wonderful as ever in this powerful, jolting & soothing work.

I firmly believe that someone above (or within, or whatever) is holding me back from hearing certain artists until they know I'm ready. I've heard the name Tom Waits in many places for many years but it wasn't until this year when I was walking around a local Sam Goody, of all places, that I actually heard the man. It took only a couple of listens of Bloody Money for him to draw me into a more atmoshperic and artistic version of the dark carnival that the Insane Clown Posse have been promising me for years. Tom barks more than he sings and he writes words that could not be performed as perfectly by anyone else. Of the two albums he released this year I find that Blood Money only beats the more tortoisetic Alice by a hair. Even with his distinct sound, the albums are quite literally as different as night and day-- although I would be hard pressed to say which was which. From songs like Misery's The River Of The World and God's Away On Buisness from Blood Money to Alice from Alice, Tom paints a landscape that you will enjoy wandering around again and again. This is an artist whose collection I plan on delving much deeper into in the coming years.

After more than thirty years of sending out his bottled messages out into the world, Tom Waits is finally being heard. 1999's "Mule Variations" was his most successful CD to date.

Now, in 2002, Waits has released two albums of material from two different stage plays for which he's composed music over the last decade. On his latest, "Blood Money," he perfects the mix of Eastern European schlock, trash-can symphonies, and creaky heart-tuggers he's been working toward for years. The pictures in the sleeve alone are worth the price of admission.

More focused than "The Black Rider" and weirder than "Swordfishtrombones," "Blood Money" is a vision of a man torn apart by infidelity and generalized bad luck in life. In this circus of the cuckolded, everything sounds as if it were recorded in the 1920's. On bad mics. Oustide. At a carnival.

If you're just starting with Waits, try "Mule Variations." If you're swinging from lamp posts drunk on a rainy Saturday night, "Blood Money" may be right on the mark. Bleak, disturbing, and horrifically fun.

Tom Waits... There is something to be said about an artist that I specifically put on at full volume on Halloween to scare children, and who's music I find so moving that at times it brings me to tears. That somewhat describes the artist that is Tom Waits. This year, he followed up 1999's Mule Variations with TWO new albums of music. Alice and Blood Money, although complimentary, are two separate and fantastic albums. Alice has a fantastical and fictional feel - as if Through the Looking-Glass met with Where the Wild Things Are; a peek into a world where things are not as they seem and the characters lurking inside are as fascinating as they are freakish. Tracks like, "Table-Top Joe" and "We're All Mad Here" compliment the freakish side, while the wistful and sad numbers like "Barcarolle" and "Fish and Bird" shows the true beauty of the wonderland that Waits has created. Blood Money, on the other hand, is like a trip to hell carefully narrated and brought to life by Waits' voice, lyrics and instrumentation. With tracks like, "God's Away On Business" and "Everything Goes to Hell," it's pretty easy to find yourself trapped on Waits' demonic calliope. Both albums offer a glimpse of Waits as frightfully fantastic and humbly sincere.

Tom Waits, America's greatest songwriter and most interesting vocal stylist, is back, and not just once, with this album, 'Blood Money', but with its more sensitive sister, 'Alice', released simultaneously. Waits is, like Australia's Nick Cave, a traditionalist combined with a subversive. Both work within a range of themes and forms, though, musically, Waits is the more complex at experimentation, and the one brilliantly interested in pastiche and parody to underline his lyrical concerns.

As a songwriter, Waits has always been at his best in chewing up the idioms of popular music, ragtime, blues, Sousa marches, circus calliopies, lounge-jazz, country, and spitting them out in mangled, problematic, mangled hybrids. Waits' cynicism and despair are often commented on, and are perhaps more obvious here than usual, but like the great Bertolt Brecht, Waits is fiercely humanist with a sentimental core. Like Brecht, he sees humanity as capable of cruelty, alienation and dreams, and is therefore prepared to celebrate even as he damns. In this album, originally a song cycle for Robert Wilson's production of Buchner's great play `Woyczeck', Waits approaches the Brecht of Baal, an early play with sung interludes, but suffused with the sensibilities of Tin Pan Alley. This means that, while he has the bile and bale of Brecht, he lacks his ideological bite, replacing it with a sense of the sadness that lies at the heart of American popular culture that Brecht never grasped.

As a vocalist, this album is less marked by the fun-house play vaudeville voices, but it is a song-cycle representing the worldview, albeit developing, of Woyzceck himself, so consistency is important. Similarly, the music is less viscerally exciting, less marked by abrupt changes and odd juxtapositions. Where the major albums since the startling `swordfishtrombones', most notably the last collaboration with Robert Wilson, `The Black Rider', have been raucously dynamic explosions in the American popular songbook - Dylan's `Love and Theft' fed through John Zorn - though there is a taste of this in `Knife Chase'. This album is more muted, and has a feel of musically form before the disruptions of jazz and ragtime. Doubtlessly this is deliberate - the album works as a transposition of lmid-19th century European despair to a late 19th century American context.

Likewise, Waits threatens to fall into formula in his lyrics, albeit his own unique formulation. Nonetheless, no-one does sardonic surrealism like Waits, and this is the main reason this album is important, and there are times when Waits succeeds perfectly in upping the ante of his own mordant wit, most notably the refrain of the opening track, `The River of Misery', `Everybody row', affirming the dignity of struggle against the tide, even as it firms the hopelessness of the struggle.

One of the pleasures the album does give is his own reading of the song he gave Ute Lemper for her `Punishing Kiss' album, should-have-been-a-classic-if-Waits-weren't-right-and-god-was-not-away-on-business, `The Part You Throw Away'. This song shows Waits' innate sense of the core of a song - a human heart, wrapped with a sharp mind, delivered in a flawless sense of slightly dissonant melody.

Another, and unexpected, pleasure is the return of the barroom-crooner Waits of `Nighthawks At the Diner' era - one I hadn't realised I had missed amongst the experimentation of the past two decades. It is clear on a song like `Lullaby', and, goddamn, it's nice to have him back. The two Waits - old and new - even coexist on a track like `Coney Island Baby', with its nod to Lou Reed in the title, which reminds one of the world-away innocence of an old song like `Jersey Girl'. Indeed, the album echoes just about all of his work, a jazz break reminiscent of `Raindogs', a chant like `The Black Rider'. Whether this is a positive or a negative is up to the listener, but perhaps there are few better people to steal from than Waits himself ?

Many of these songs, for whatever flaws might be found in the all-over conception of the work, could become classics of popular song, and if they were to they might nourish that vital tradition that Waits has so consistently drawn upon. Like Brecht before him, he might nip at that hand occasionally, but he knows it has fed him well.

I just saw Wilson's (& Waits's) version of "Woyzeck" last night. I am definitely buying the cd. The music made the production. I've directed Woyzeck and I still use it in my script analysis class. I couldn't imagine more fitting, engagingly dissonant and juxtaposed music. It really captures all the forces at work on the person of Woyzeck. The music makes the drama. Even if you didn't see the show, you can take the journey through Waits's music.

Tom Waits has been producing some of the most intriguing and stunning music for over thirty years now. From his barroom-boozy-Beat-blues of the '70s, through his inspired musical experimentation of the '80s, to his brilliant masterworks of the '90s and today, he has continually propelled American music. With his two new albums Waits has solidified his status as "The Mad Ring Leader." Here, with Blood Money, Waits returns to the territory he first explored with Swordfishtrombones, and perfected with his masterpiece Black Rider. No coincidence that this music is also from a play commandeered by Robert Wilson. Their collaborations have produced what I personally hold as Waits' Ultimate Body of Work. Although, I have been a fan of Waits for years, I have not enjoyed every album. His most critically acclaimed (and bestselling) records have stood among my least favorite (Bone Machine & Mule Variations). Therefore I do not listen and excuse with blind devotion. That's why this album pleases me so much, it IS everything I love about Waits: the ghostly circus music, the melodic lullabies, the marches the ballads the rock 'n roll! And the lyrics, those mad mad lyrics, which always seem more focused and direct when written for a play (i.e. Frank's Wild Years, Black Rider, etc.). With Blood Money all the best of Waits has been compiled and streamlined. The instrumentation, reminiscent of his classic '80s albums, has been stripped down to what appear to be Waits' favorites: piano, guitar, drums, calliope, and strings. The focused lyrics, mentioned above. The voice (which for any fan is not just a novelty item to be described ad nauseam), which sways between gruff and lilting, always captures the essence of the song. If Waits has not solidified his standing in the pantheon of rock music already, then Blood Money will be the album to do it.