Customer Reviews

Mule Variations

5 star:		(177)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

"Mule Variations" is, simply, the most solid piece of work Tom Waits has released since "Rain Dogs". That's not to say I didn't enjoy "Frank's Wild Years" and "Bone Machine"; they both, however, only serve as sketches of the fleshed-out world Waits presents us with here.

From the opening track 'Big in Japan' (a track quite reminiscent of "Bone Machine's" 'Goin' Out West')to the closing 'Come On Up to the House,' Waits is in rare form lyrically and vocally. And he's even added a new twist to his repetoire on this album: a DJ scratching in the background on several tracks, most notably the beefed-up and funkified remix of 'Filipino Boxspring Hog.'

Waits covers all of the various styles and influences that inform his music with deftness on this album. He moves from the guitar-driven ballad ('Hold On') through Blues-based quirkiness ('Cold Water' and 'Chocolate Jesus') to quiet (?) piano crooning ('Picture in a Frame' and 'Take it with me when I go')and never misses a beat or sings a line that seems untrue to what we've come to love about Waits's gruff persona over the years.

His unique view of the world and relationships is intact, and rings as true as ever on this album. These lines, from 'Black Market Baby,' pretty much sum it all up: "My eyes say their prayers to her, sailors ring her bell / Like a moth mistakes a lightbulb for the moon and goes to hell. . ."

This album is a "must-buy" for any Waits fan, and would make an excellent introduction to his music for anybody still on your shopping list.

If there's anyone in the music business who's managed to fend off the over-the-hill label, it's Tom Waits, and 1999's Mule Variations is one of the most compelling documents of his staying power. Even in his forties, with a huge body of work already behind him, Tom Waits was putting out the kind of seminal albums that most acts are lucky to put out once in the prime of their careers. I wouldn't say this album is guite as great as Rain Dogs, Bone Machine, or Real Gone, but it still sits comfortably right below them, which is saying something. For a contemporary comparison, even the vaunted current runs of the White Stripes and Wilco aren't in the same category as the string of classics Waits has reeled off since Rain Dogs. Most of his songs aren't particularly complex, but (at least from Swordfishtrombones on) Waits has proven to be a master at crafting distinctive, memorable music with nothing more than his gravelly baritone and some rock-meets-blues-meets-folk-meets-country backing sounds. And of course, there's his vocal range, which covers everything from atonal rasps to achy crooning.

Waits's notorious drunken-werewolf howl actually doesn't make too many appearances here, although it is on fine form on the evil mutant blues of Big in Japan, Eyeball Kid, and Filipino Box Spring Hog. These three songs nicely showcase the noisy, cantankerous arrangements that have made Waits such a renowned experimentalist, but overall this album is more notable for its eclecticism and inspired vocalizations than for its sonic adventurism. Even more than with Bone Machine and Real Gone, you get to hear Waits from pretty much every conceivable angle here. Yes, much of it's pretty low-key, but at sixteen songs you'll still find plenty of high-quality stuff, even if Mule Variations does contain my least favorite Waits song in the form of House Where Nobody Lives. Much like Rain Dogs, this album doesn't just contain many of Waits's best songs, it contains next to none of his worst.

After firing out of the gate with the aformentioned Big in Japan, Mule Variations tones down the volume a bit for a while, but what it sacrifices in volume it more than makes up for in atmosphere. Low Side of the Road unfolds into a swampy, minimalist, horn-fuelled crawl that gets under your skin and stays there. Hold On could almost be described as radio-friendly, what with its encouraging message and readily accessible structure, but its shuffling beat and Waits's world-weary storytelling style elevate it well above the status of mundane balladry. Of course, the positive vibe doesn't last too long, as Waits reveals his scarier side once again on Get Behind the Mule, an eerie, smoky little tune whose subtly creepy instrumentation is the perfect complement to the foreboding imagery of the lyrics. Pony is yet another masterpiece of Waits minimalism: a few supporting instruments drift in and out of the mix, but Waits's scratchy vocals and sparse acoustic guitar picking are all that's needed to create an ambience of disillusionment and hope at the same time.

It's after Pony though, when Mule Variations enters its second half, that Waits really starts digging into his repertoire like a veteran pitcher forced to get by on smarts. As the number of tracks gets into double digits, Waits unveils no less than three piano ballads, and while they're hardly among my favorites in his catalogue, they're still notable both for the conviction in Waits's voice and the different mood he manages to bring to each one: hopeful on Picture in a Frame; mournful in Georgia Lee; and (most surprising of all) romantic on Take it with Me. At other times Waits gets just plain weird; as evidence witness the clanging backbeats of the paranoid, spoken-world What's He Building? and the decidedly unorthodox religious reflections of the country-blues tune Chocolate Jesus. And since you can't have an authentic Tom Waits masterpiece without a moving anthem to conclude things, he delivers perhaps his finest such moment here with the rousing, infectious Come on up to the House, a seven-man romp with some of his most strangely inspirational lyrics. He even manages to drop a Thomas Hobbes quote in there without sounding pretentious, which I wouldn't have thought possible. But then, this is Tom Waits we're talking about, so I guess anything's possible.

This great album opens with Big In Japan, a humorous number in bluesy style with brilliant guitar and innovative arrangement, which is followed by the slow, eerie Lowside Of The Road, a real hangover song with striking imagery.

Hold On is a typical sad Waits ballad, which means it's beautiful, tuneful and moving. It has an unusually light rhythm and melody though, unlike some of his other masterpiece ballads like for example In The Neighbourhood or Saving All My Love For You. House Where Nobody Lives is unique too, another gripping ballad with moving words and images. It makes me think of both Mansion On The Hill by Springsteen and the old classic Satisfied Mind.

All Waits' styles are in glorious display including the talking blues of Get Behind The Mule and the deep bluesrock of ballads like Come On Up To The House and Cold Water. For someone who prefers his ballads and his singing voice, I find both quite appealing. The next track, Pony, is another one of my favorite slow melodic numbers embellished with exquisite pump organ, dobro and harp.

This album certainly lives up to its name with its astonishing variety, like the spooky spoken track What's He Building and the story songs Black Market Baby and Eyeball Kid with its innovative samples and percussion. Waits even explores his Beefheartian side on Filipino Box Spring Hog. There's also the gentle love song Picture In A Frame with its elegant piano and the sorrowful country song Georgia Lee.

Mule Variations is a masterpiece of an album that contains impressive, timeless songs of great lyrical depth, melodic beauty and stylistic variety. Whether you like Waits as a phenomenon by himself or whether you like only certain of his styles, this album will not disappoint as it offers enough brilliance for everybody.

Mule Variations is perhaps one of the best albums Tom Waits has ever made. It's an amalgam of the melancholy ballads of 'The Heart of Saturday Night' and 'Blue Valentine' that characterised his early career, and the unique groove and ambition of his later work (such as 'Rain Dogs') under the Island label. What's more is that it combines the best elements of both. Ultimately, Mule Variations is an example of how good Waits can be - he takes the listener on an emotional journey full of sadness, happiness and reflection.

Waits has always been unique. Over time, there has been a plethora of musicians that imitate, to varying degrees of success, Waits' original and idiosyncratic style. Often he uses instruments like plane saws, xylophones and pump organs. This is especially so in Mule Variations, in which he uses a wide variety of instruments to full effect. Added to which, his cancerous drawl transcends each piece of music to a higher emotional plane, especially in such pieces as 'Lowside of the Road' and 'Eyeball Kid'. If its evocative music you're after, Mule Variations certainly delivers. Ballads such as 'Picture in a Frame' and 'Hold On' tickle the back of your throat, but if you don't cry after listening to 'Take it With Me' then something is definitely wrong with you. He balances the sadness and melancholy of the aforementioned songs with more forceful pieces such as the full on 'Big in Japan' and the heavy crashing of 'Filipino Box Spring Hog'. These last two are the sort of music that typified Waits' Island years (see 'Underground' and 'Down in the Hole'). Throughout the 70 minute CD (great value with 16 songs available), Waits also peppers the album with bizarre numbers such as the spoken 'What's he Building?' which chills the listener to the bone; the glockenspiel-inflected 'Black Market Baby' and the heart wrenching tale of 'Georgie Lee', the story of a murdered teenage girl.

Ultimately Mule Variations is 70 minutes of Waits at his best. It confirms that Waits is truly a musical statesman that stands alone from the rest of the pack. Musicians such as David Bowie and Elvis Costello have praised his musical talent for a long time, and Mule Variations is the perfect of example of why. It's an album like no other, totally varied in musical and emotional content. So whether or not you're looking for an introduction to Waits' music or if you are a true, die-hard fan, Mule Variations should be on your CD rack.

Buy this album.

There you go. That's pretty much everything I have to say. Tom Waits has found his voice, and if his entire repertoire, his entire history were to disappear from the Earth tomorrow, Mule Variations by itself would be enough to justify his place in music history.

The first song, Big in Japan, leads you to expect the same atonality and tribal-rhythm driven poundings that he delivered on his Bone Machine album. And those elements are there; but they are softened and tempered by a compassion and humanity that emanates from practically every chord struck.

His lyrics here combine the poetic doggerel of his Small Change years without striking the same false and affected (if fun) notes found there:

Down by the Riverside motel,
it's 10 below and falling
by a 99 cent store she closed her eyes
and started swaying
but it's so hard to dance that way
when it's cold and there's no music

(from "Hold On")

Every song on the album has a lyric that will stay with you for days after hearing it: "She's a diamond that wants to stay coal." "Well its got to be a chocolate Jesus, keep me satisfied." "Come down off the cross ... we can use the wood."

The music, of course, will stay in your head as well. The traditional blues influence that has always been in Waits' music is more visible here, thanks to more subdued production than on the previous albums. The album is carried on the strength of its writing and on Waits' plaintive voice. This was Tom Waits' first studio album in 6 years. It was worth the wait. Rarely do artists get this much better with age. Waits continually stuns me with his ability to pioneer his own unique sound without falling into a stylistic rut. We are all richer for his very existence.

Tom Waits' first REAL album release in six years sounds much more down to earth than, say for example, "Rain Dogs". Maybe it's the move to the countryside, maybe it's Tom getting older, I don't know, but it sure as hell sounds great... It's actually among his very best. Listen to songs like "Hold On", "Hous Where Nobody Lives", "Cold Water", "Pony", "Eyeball Kid", "Picture In A Frame", "Chocolate Jesus" or "Georgia Lee" and you can understand why he is concidered to be one of the most talented -if not THE most talnted - songwriters of our time. There's just so much humility and warmth in his songs. Especially the lyrics are genious in some places, and the sympathic sound of the instuments make their sound even more cosy. This is the best album of the last year of the second millenium. Ain't that something!

First, let it be said that Waits is one of my musical heroes. He has an amazing voice, a killer sense for evocative productions, and amazing songwriting skills. His songs are gruffly affecting or just plain scary. I have 99% of everything he's ever done.

However, I just can't bring myself to worship this album like so many other fans seem to. Many hardcore Waits fans have noticed this too... there's something fundamentally not here on this record.

I'll try to explain. Waits' music moved from the Weill-y to the Partch-ian after "Big Time" in 1988. His music became rougher, bluesier, darker, more skronky. This mix was really really powerful... Bone Machine is perhaps the ideal example of this, and is one of the most musically interesting records I've heard.

However, Waits turns his back on the first-take swampiness of this trend completely on this record... it seems almost overproduced and too clean -- "Get Behind the Mule" in particular bothers me. The pseudo-junk quality of "Cold Water" and "Chocolate Jesus" seems phony also. This album does sound plenty weird, but formulaically so. That's one thing.

Secondly, the genres he covers don't always work, and often seem like simple reduxes of earlier songs. "Hold On" is way too reminiscent of his twin rock-ish ballads from 1985's Raindogs --"Downtown Train" and "Hang Down Your Head." "Get Behind the Mule" cops its groove straight from "Gun Street Girl" or "All Stripped Down" (all rough percussion and muttered vocals, but again without the excitement of Bone Machine). "Chocolate Jesus" is just pretty dull. It's a very funny, ironic tune, but the performance is sacrificed in favor of a gimmicky field-recording sound that really can't top the clank of something like "Murder in the Red Barn." "What's He Building" is a straight ripoff of "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me." The more piano-led material also often seems like a lite distillation of the yearning characters of Waits' Elektra period, before he "went weird" -- "Pony" is laughable ("I've seen it all boys"? gimme a break) and musically dull, "Georgia Lee," "House Where Nobody Lives" and "Hold On," while performed well, seem too maudlin and emotionally simplistic.

This brings me to my 3rd beef, the lyrics. "Hold On" is, let's not mince words here, "Time"-lite. It doesn't hold a narrative or even a theme, just little greeting card images of heartbreak. Same for "House Where Nobody Lives" (although not as bad, as it has more of a classic sound and feel) and "Pony." "Get Behind the Mule" and "Cold Water" are limp, both also being collections of 2-line vignettes without anything to tie them together. Who can forget the thrill of the caper described in "Gun Street Girl" or the ominous character of "Black Wings"? Waits is simply not up to it here.

However, Waits fans are a spoiled lot. TW's discography is mighty, a 25-year body of work that's almost continual innovation. Waits mastered the story song, the heartbreak song, the greasy blues, the beatnik jazz ballad, and countless other genres of his own invention. By almost any other standard but Waits's own, this is a hell of a record. The strength of the best of these songs (and hell, even the weak ones) comes out live -- Waits rasping cheerfully about the "immaculate confection" of "Chocolate Jesus" makes you grin every time.

And of course, since this review has been more of a rant, I didn't mention the many fantastic songs that absolutely rule. "Big in Japan" is a manic jungle funk with blasts of horn, jagged guitar and a killer sound effect loop. "Lowside of the Road" is clankingly primitive and fabulous. "Black Market Baby" is a snappy jazz tune performed with the sonic quality of dripping water, and has the great line "She's a diamond that wants to stay coal." "Picture in a Frame" is an elegant, simple love song, with a strong soul influence, highlighted by Waits' warm growl. "Filipino Box Spring Hog" is crazy Beefheartian funk with a crashing, crunchy groove. And of course, the back to back masterpieces that close the record "Take It With Me" and "Come On Up to the House" simply astonish; the former being a ballad about the power of memory that will probably live on as one of his most universally appealing songs (a la "The Heart of Saturday Night"); and the latter being a moving soul-gospel uproar with Waits' best vocal performance since (dare I say it?) "Anywhere I Lay My Head."

While this album may be fundamentally weaker than many of his others, it's still a TW album for God's sake, and the man is after all a genius. We have to forgive him his occasional weak moments.

If Tom Waits were to die tomorrow (And let's pray for the sake of music everywhere he doesn't) how would reviewers treat a retrospective of his work? Certainly, they'd look at Mule Variation, his latest release, and probably realize that no album really sums up the contradictions and phases of Waits better. This album combines almost every type of music he's ever made, from the Raindogs vibe of "Phillipeno Box Spring Hog" to the failed love of "House Where Nobody Lives" to the jazz standard "Picture in a Frame". Waits is truly a maverick, and one of the greatest songwriters of the last 50 years. This album really allows the power of music, gimmick free, to explode into the listener's ear. I was caught first by "Cold Water" his rather dark and ironicly funny paen to homelessness. Later, the rest of the album song by song clicked into place. Buy this album to hear what REAL musicians do.

7 long years in the making, this is Waits' 1st album since 1993's BLACK RIDER. Here, Waits picks up with an album divided between the extremes of barnstorming surrealism & sepia toned,world weary balladry. Naked Jezebel's have axes to grind, Giants weep in the middle of the road & black elevators go down. Yet, throughout it all there's still a yearning to be in "Evelyn's kitchen with old Gyp by my side".

Raucous numbers like "Big In Japan" & "Filipino Box-Spring Hog" have Waits summoning the ghosts of Howling Wolf & Captain Beefheart with all the conviction of a backwoods preacher. "Get Behind The Mule" is a one chord meditation right in keeping with classic dirges like "Murder In The Red Barn" & "Gun Street Girl". A work song slightly left of the chain gang tradition.

Waits offers up another hilariously ominous spoken word piece in "What's he Building In There?". Whatever it is, "it isn't a playhouse for the kids".

As for the ballads, MULE seems to have a generous assortment. "Take It With Me" is among the most wry & poignant. "Picture In A Frame brings the songs of Stephen Foster to mind. "Pony" draws on old cowboy ballads & "House Nobody Lives In" is easily the album's most unabashedly sentimental number. The likes of Bruce Springsteen are put to shame with the woeful optimism of "Hold On". But the true-life murder ballad, "Georgia Lee" proves to be the most devastating of the lot with it's haunting refrain, "why wasn't God watching".

Where "Chocolate Jesus" & "Eyeball Kid" capture Waits at his most playful, numbers like "Black Market Baby" & "Lowside Of The Road" keep things firmly on the dark side.

The rousing Gospel of "Come On Up To The House" pulls the curtain with such sage advice as, "come down off the cross, we could use the wood".

Though MULE VARIATIONS may not prove to be Waits' most groundbreaking album, it's certainly a welcome return. A dust-in-your-eye travelogue set in the wastlands just beyond the rusty scrapyard of The Blues.

This is the first Tom Waits album I've purchased. Apparently, from the some of the reviews that I've read here, he has other albums as good or better. That's great news for me because I can't listen to this album enough! It really grows on you. I can't explain why I like it...I just do.

I'm about the same age as Tom and can't imagine how I could have missed out on this for so long. Though his style is quite novel, I was under the wrong impression that his was just a novelty act...it's not...his music is for real. I won't pretend to be a music critic. All I can say is that I really like this album and look forward (backward?) to trying some of his past albums as well.

Try it...give it a little time...I'll bet you'll like it.