Customer Reviews

Bone Machine

5 star:		(74)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Those vocals. Those lyrics. That mood. This was My first foray into Tom's world: a gift when I was 14. I haven't looked back. From the alpha (the thumping primitive drums of "Earth Died Screaming") to the omega (the howling chorus of guys and guitars finishing off "That Feel"), this CD is like nothing else on the planet. This is a macabre, twisted world: a vision entirely of Mr. and Mrs. Waits devising (Kathleen Brennan is his wife and they write together- what a team!)

Lyrically, this is light years beyond so much music out there. Namely all of it. Waits never stoops to cliche, never resorts to the old, crusty, stale rhymes and metaphors that haunt the minds of most song-smiths. His lyrics are restlessly inventive and vivid. When he tells a story he lures you in, shows you the scene and leaves you there to figure out what happened and find your own way home again.

On the whole, this is a dark album, and it fits easily into his output from the 80's-90's... Songs such as "In the Colosseum," and "Murder in the Red barn," are eerie and unsettling. Still, Tom doesn't just write disturbing music. "Little rain," "Whistle Down the Wind," and "Who Are You," are more upbeat pieces, meaning the lovelorn lyrics and strange musings are masked by a major-key chord progression. The musical styles veer all over the board- never quite playing its straight, some of the songs are country sounding, some are folk, a couple are blues... But not quite. They inhabit a strange place between genres.

Some highlights:

The rusty, falsetto croon of "Dirt in the ground" set to the kind of funeral march horns and beat you'd expect to see in New Orleans, if New Orleans were populated by half-dead prophets and zombie musicians!

The sweet, bluesy satire of "Jesus Gonna Be Here," that sounds like Tom waits is actually a venerable bluesman from the Mississippi Delta. I played this at work once and everyone in the kitchen insisted that the singer must be a black guy. Just Tom, a bass-line and two-notes of twangy guitar. The cough at the end of the song- that cough has more soul than most band's entire discographies!!!!!

The Ennio Morricone-esque brilliance of "Black Wings": Tom is rolling the wheel of an old film projector and he rasps and murmurs and tells the story of a strange character who has no name... This song is brilliant!!! The guitar and the swishing drums... nothing I have ever heard sounds like this.

Buy this CD- it's a great trampoline into Waits' more out there stuff. And it's easily one of his more balanced CDs- almost no sleeper tracks!

Fun Fact: Earth Died Screaming is used for a scene in the Gilliam film "12 Monkeys," when Bruce Willis has taken Madeleine Stowe hostage and she's driving him into a large city (Philadelphia, I think). Also, the steady cam scene in "Fight Club," where Tyler Durden and his crew walk through the junky bar and into the basement while Ed Norton voice-over's the sequence (right before he gives them The Rules...) is set to Goin' Out West- that dark, mutant surf-rock bass riff...

C'mon, take a chance on this!

This is Tom Waits's best album, as an album. Though he has long written some of the most distinctive and original songs in popular music, Waits's albums have at times been notoriously uneven. This was mostly in the 70's, when he was putting out an album a year for Asylum, and was practically gone by the time of his 80's re-invention with Swordfishtrombones, when he started releasing sprawling, epic albums for Island. Bone Machine is the culmination of that. Though not a concept album, all the songs on Bone Machine deal with the same grisly subject: mortality. The album is death-obsessed and deals with the oft-seeming futility of the human condition. And it is, as the title of one of the songs indicates, "all stripped down." Though by the time of this album's release, Waits had long ago abandoned the piano as the lead instrument in his songs in favor of an amalgram of horns and jangling percussion, Bone Machine often strips this idea down to the bare minimum. Earth Died Screaming starts the album out appropriately, with its lyrical desolation of imagery, and its simple percussion that clangs along behind Waits's croaking delivery. The occasional guitar and piano (and, surprisingly and to good effect, steel guitar) permeates the sonic landscape, but it's largely that distinctive "junkyard percussion" sound that carries along Waits's impeding lyrics here, moreso than ever. Waits is at his croaking best on this album: his screeching, gravel-throated growl giving the gloomy lyrics the intonation they require. Several of the songs feature heavily-distorted, studio-enchanced (or de-enchanced) vocals, while the processed voice on The Ocean Doesn't Want Me is stunning in its evocativeness; and it's a further statement of irony that the most lyrically vile song of all, Who Are You, is the only song on the album delivered in Waits's typical ballad voice. Bone Machine is a harrowing masterpiece. All the songs flow naturally into one another, and it has a very cohesive feel, something that not even the best of Waits's albums always have. In a career populated with the strangest of imagery, Bone Machine sticks out in Tom Waits's canon like a literal sore thumb - one of his best albums, that any fan will love.

I became re-acquainted with Tom Waits' material through "Bone Machine" and, though the Grammy Awards now honor only musical mediocrity (with lamentably few worthy exceptions), they DID have enough sense back in '93 to recognize this CD's sublime artistry and give it an award (Best Alternative Recording, if memory serves ...).

And what an album it is.

It comes packed with Waits' usual (or should I say UNusual) suspects, characters pulled from some horrific, gothically imaginative nightmare: Slam the Crank from Wheezer (where the HELL did he come up with that name?), Reba the Loon, Cal and Chenoweth, Hannibal (or maybe just Rex), a lady drinking alone in her room, murderers lurking in red barns and a mysterious suicidal individual, turning away from death only because he knows "the ocean doesn't want me today".

We've all been in those black places, only Waits writes about them with such unflinching honesty and clarity that you cannot avoid the pain, even while you're chewing on his gravelly voice, filtered through strange microphones and musical equipment. There are no lush violins, no overblown scores here: it's "All Stripped Down" and that's just how we want you, Tom.

"Bone Machine" is all stripped down and glorious. It's percussive and raw; it borders on dangerous, lethal. Waits is one of a mere handful of truly gifted lyricists left in America today. Unlike so many "pop" artists, who lose their edge when they get married/get happy/have a baby, Waits manages to have a normal life with his wife, Kathleen Brennan (who also produced "Bone Machine") while still never losing sight of the darkness just behind that red barn ...

Right near that axe spattered with bloodstains ...

Tom Waits is the singer/songwriter on whom I can always rely to scare the heck out of my family and college friends. Since 1983's Swordfishtrombones, Tom has been very much doing his own thing. This has included strange "junkyard" percussion timbres, exotic instruments ranging from glass harmonicas to conundrums to stroh violins, surrealist-poetic lyrics, occasionals stints of unabashed sentimentality, and most of all, unashamed indulging of a ravaged, growling, and utterly awesome voice.

All these elements exist on 1993's Grammy winning Bone Machine. Tom Waits had been making bizarre, percussive, and fiercely original albums for ten years, and Bone Machine is an even farther departure from his previous lounge/barroom style. Lyrically, also, this may be Tom's most disturbing work of all. I have heard various explainations of the title, but there is no question that references to bones and skeletons--and, by extension, death--permeate the songs. The first two, "Earth Died Screaming" and "Dirt in the Ground", fuction as a sort of morbid one-two punch: the first being a percussive, screamed/muttered depiction of doomsday, the second an inexpressibly sad meditation on death as universal fate sung in a cracked falsetto. The amazing imagery and chilling chord progressions make this perhaps the sacriest song I have ever heard.

Picking highlights from the rest of the CD is almost impossible, since the songs are universally strong. I particularly enjoy "Who Are You?," the amazingly sad "A Little Rain," the three-chord rock of "Goin' Out West," the chilling, guitar-based "Dark Wings," the rollicking (and very perceptive) "I Don't Wanna Grow Up," and the drunkenly transcendent finale, "That Feel."

The entire album, as is the norm with Waits, is extremely acoustic, and sounds refreshingly un-produced. In fact, the recording was done inside a non-soundproofed barn. The instrumentation, of course, is highly original, particularly in the percussion section. And Tom's voice inhabits as many different styles and characters as on any of his other albums.

This is a marvellous CD; perhaps, though, not the best introduction to Waits' oeuvre, since it is more raw and extreme than some of his other works. But for all the roughness, beautiful and compelling melodies and textures abound here, and both aspects of the music sound increasingly rich and ingenious on repeated listenings. A must for all fans of Waits and of music that dares to repudiate a big-selling, middle-of-the-road sort of sound.

After 1980's HEART ATTACK & VINE indicated that Tom Waits's previous musical approach was starting to get stale, he left Elektra Records for Island. He took some time off from music, then returned composing the score for Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 film ONE FROM THE HEART (Tom has had a part in just about every Coppola film since then). But it was 1983's SWORDFISHTROMBONES that announced Tom's return to musicmaking & what a return it was! The Tom Waits that debuted 10 years ago as a crooner was gone for good, with a gravel-voiced stranger in its place & the music went from smooth to downright jagged. The album was widely hailed by critics as a modern masterpiece, an honor also given to 1985's RAIN DOGS.

Since then, music has been Tom's second priority, with his acting career gaining more prominence & composing for the stage & screen becoming more important than for the mainstream public. But when he returned to action with 1992's BONE MACHINE, it was clear that whenever Tom does get back to making albums, the time away doesn't show.

While listening to SWORDFISHTROMBONES or RAIN DOGS may have been harrowing enough for listeners, the pitch-black-dark atmosphere of BONE MACHINE is just plain frightening. Again, the album was given unanimous critical raves when it was released & Tom's hardcore fans (you pretty much have to be one to like Tom Waits) did the same as well. It was a deserved reaction to an album that has so many layers, one listen just isn't enough to take it all in.

Death & dying looms low on songs like "Jesus Gonna Be Here", "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me", "Earth Died Screaming", "Murder In The Red Barn" & "Dirt In The Ground". The lyrics are dark beauty at its finest & the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink instrumentation is both laboring & enough to have listeners discovering new elements to the songs with each listen. "Whistle Down The Wind", "Who Are You" & "Goin' Out West" are the smallest hints of normalcy among the esoterica, but even those songs have their avant-garde moments.

"I Don't Wanna Grow Up" was the "hit" off this album, strangely enough & it's no surprise. Not only is it probably the most accessible song on BONE MACHINE, but it's truly one of Tom's best songs ever. MTV even gave the video a fair amount of airplay & the Ramones later covered it, creating one of their last great recordings. "That Feel" closes the album with a drunken sing-along featuring Tom's good buddy Keith Richards. In a sense, this darkly humorous tune is a good way to end what is truly a roller-coaster ride for the listener.

Not many people can disappear from the music scene for an extended period of time & come back with what could very well be their crowning acheivement, yet Tom Waits did this time around. While he would disappear for 7 more years after this to pursue other endeavors, BONE MACHINE was still a great thing to leave us with until Tom returned. It would also be a good preparation for what was about to come next.

With the mind of an oddball drifter and a voice withered down by cigarettes and alcohol, Tom Waits takes his listeners on an introspective ride across the forgotten lands that lie beneath the surface...along the way, he reports on what he sees with a personal touch: various lonely characters, outdated civilizations and beliefs, scary supernatural imagery, and mounds upon miles of catharsis. To further warp you into this 19th century backworld, he recites the songs with a mixture of ethnic percussion (including bones on "Earth Died Screaming"), simplistic blues guitar, moody jazz instrumentations, gospel piano, and curious spooks from a chamberlain. But the album is not completely "non-rocking", thanks to the 'traveling on a lost highway' strummer "Goin' Out West" and the youth anthem "I Don't Wanna Grow Up". Waits is clearly the bizarre hermit poet that we never knew of, and easily the alter-ego of Bob Dylan from a parallel dimension. If all of his material is like this, include me in his road-worn isolation.

There are many terrific albums that have been recorder in the history of mankind. The Stones Exile on Main Street, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, Nirvana's Nevermind, The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. All of these albums are famous and awe-inspiring, yet all of them are what can be dubbed as "Accesible". Tom Waits, for all his genius arrangement and lyrical skills as well as his unique approach to singing, cannot be deemed "accessable" by any definition of the word. A person has to have a certain mind ste to listen to Tom Waits. For everyone who thinks they might like Tom Waits, BUY THIS ALBUM. For everyone that has no interest in Tom Waits BUY THIS ALBUM. Why? Because its the greatest peice of musical and lyrical genius that exists in the spectrum of modern music. From the claning death-knell of "Earth Died Screaming" to the drunken alleyway chorus, consisting of Tom and fellow barroom legend Keith Richards, of "That Feel", this album defines the sound of awesomeness. There is no bad song on this album, and there is sense of filler. All the songs are individual and creative in their presentation, yet are all similar as are all "Tom Waits Songs".

Earth Died Screaming- Salvador Dali set to a clanking refrain of percussion. Perhaps the most warped peice of genius on te entire album.

Dirt In The Ground- Wavering, piano driven dirge that pulls the listener into its dark and twisted picture of death. Brilliant imagery.

Such a Scream- It clanks, it screams, it weezes, ITS THE QUENTESSENTIAL TOM WAITS SONG!

All Stripped Down- Delta blues mixed with Lo-Fi techno with just enough apocalyptic imagery to satisfy everyone.

Who Are You- The first real "ballad" of the album. Its in the same vein as Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman", but darker, more akin to Kerouak in its lyrics and juxtapositions.

The Ocean Doesn't Want Me- This is a slow, spoken word song that scared the HELL out of me the first time I heard it. Its like a the aurual composition of a suicide note. Very very dark.

Jesus Gonna Be Here- Blues-gospel sung in Tom's falsetto like only Tom can sing it.

A Little Rain- This is the 2nd best ballad on the album. The last verse still makes me cry.

In The Colosseum- Beautiful, if somewhat morbid, imagery here. Very clanking, rythm driven (just like most other songs on the album).

Goin' Out West- Dear God I love this song. The riffs and beats are deceptively simple, and the lyrics jsut paint the most beautiful picture of a tatooed outlaw that's "goin' out westwhere the wind blows tall"

Murder in the Red Barn- Another southern-fried bluesy one, with the weirdest damned banjo I've ever heard taking the place of the Dobro.

Black Wings- Very cinematic song, in its lyrics and presentation. Gotta Love It!

Whistle Down the Wind- No contest, saddest song ever. Its about desperation, and boredom, and being damned to live in the same time all your life till you're the dirt on the roads you;ve waked all your life.

I Don't Wanna Grow Up- The closest Tom ever gets o nthis one to "rocking out".

Let Me Get Up On It- Very disturbing.

That Feel- I'm a bit biased cause I'm a Keith fan, but this is a Helluva way to close an album, and its also the way I'm gonna end this review.

Tom Waits dug deep to find this one - and he dug all over the place. Visceral, vivid and jarring, 'Bone Machine' is a boisterous celebration of all things nocturnal. Unfolding like a bad dream, the album careens from track to track as Waits assumes roles varied roles: narrator, spectator, prophet, grim reaper. In "black wings," a sinister cowboy ballad, Waits is a wizened storyteller; in "in the colloseum," an ugly ode to carnage, he's an unabashed participant.

There are moments of warmth in 'Bone Machine;' most notable is "who are you," a deeply romantic song of painful love - "are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?" Waits asks, mixing wit and hurt. On other tracks, Waits' juxtapositions are less expected and even more unsettling. The album's opening track, "earth died screaming," combines bare, almost tribal preccusion with a harsh interpretation of R&B; the result is dark, grating and very effective.

'Bone Machine' is bewitching. Listen to it at night.

When Waits began recording for Bone Machine, he said this of the studio he was working in: "I was so disturbed; the studio we got was totally wrong. I was stomping around thinking, nothing will ever grow in this room. I'm more and more inclined towards texture, and you can't get texture with this whole bioregenerator-flesh approach to recording." He and his band ended up recording the album in a storage room with broken windows and mysterious world maps taped to the walls. This event foreshadowed Bone Machine extremely well.

Unquestionably Wait's most macabre work, Bone Machine oozes just as many layers as his atmospheric inclinations--from the tribal drum beats to the ravaged howling, to the touching piano ballads that have echoes of his Island years. The album certainly lacks polish in the traditional sense--percussion is more likely to be extracted from beating on abandoned hotel furniture then from using a drum set--but this primal urgency gives this album an irresistible ambiance.

It's still arguable to me whether Waits ever surpassed Bone Machine lyrically, from the most desperate and insane lyrics that will be an utter delight to aficionados and lovers of his gnarled personality:

"The quill from a buzzard, the blood writes the word
I want to know, am I the sky or a bird
`Cause hell is boiling over and heaven is full
We're chained to the world and we all gotta pull"

To the tender, sad ballads that add a great amount of diversity to the album and strike an almost holy emotional chord:

"She was 15 years old
and she'd never seen the ocean
She climbed into a van
with a vagabond
And the last thing she said
was 'I love you mom'
And a little rain never hurt no one"

Bone Machine is in many people's minds Wait's magnum opus. The accessibility of Wait's masterful ballads make it a great first purchased for burgeoning Tom Waits fan, and the dark, death-obsessed howls make it a mandatory addition to any obsessive lover's collection.

5/5

I will start by saying that Bone Machine is a great piece of work. If I was unconvinced that Tom Waits had genius in his blood, this would dispel it. At the same time this is not a recording that I can whip out at any time and enjoy. For openers, I can not play this this one when my wife is at home or awake. It drives her nuts. Musically this makes the Delta Blues seem like a chamber quartet. Harsh guitars compete with rattling and pounding percusion instruments. Waits voice sounds like it is about to give out from too much screaming. Lyrically it is just as harsh and seems obsessed with Death. In the midst of this cacophony lies the beauty that is Wait's genius. Waits has taken the direction begun on Swordfishtrombones to it's end. What on the surface sometimes seems deranged is keen with details and a dry sense of humor. If you are a fan of Flannery O'Conner, try Murder in the Red Barn on for size.