Customer Reviews

Orphans [Vinyl]

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"What's Orphans? I don't know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." Tom Waits

A 54 song masterpiece is what I call this new Tom Waits 3 CD rumble. A phalanx of songs from every period of life and every genre of American music. He has separated these 3 CD's into a concise set of marvelously named originals called 'Orphans"- 'Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards'. His wife Kathleen collaborated with Tom, and they have done his fine whiskey voice justice.

Brawler, disc one, was my least favorite, but I have listened 4 times and this set has grown close to my heart. The 16 songs on this disc are a mix of juke box, Muddy Waters blues and honky tonk, clangy tunes. 'Sea of Love' is done with a clever twist.

'Bawlers', disc two, is my favorite full of ballads of gone wrong. 20 songs a mixture of saloon songs , Celtic songs and torch songs. 'Tell It To Me' is a country song full of yearning and the rest of the group is as lovely and sad as you would want. They all give a message of the end of the road and hope is strong.

'Bastards' is an amalgamation of songs that don't fit elsewhere. 20 songs, some experimental, from Army Ants to King Kong and a poem by Bukowski. Tom Waits has some strange stories to tell on disc 3- 'night, night'. This is the perfect ending to a three series set that frames the art written and sung by Tom Waits.

Tom Waits was named as one of VH-1's Most Influential Artists of All Time, and it is no surprise that Waits' body of work has long been covered by other musicians. "There is also a long list of artists who have cited Waits as an inspiration, including Bob Dylan who named Tom as one of his "secret heroes". Boston Phoenix

As Tom Wait said in an interview "The center of this record is my voice. I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice, I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer...I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument". And Tom Waits has given us his best instrument wrapped up in gold. A truly special series of songs for all of us Tom Waits fans. Bravo.

Highly Recommended. prisrob 11/22/06

Well, Waits has finally emptied out the orphange. Then burnt it to the ground. Torched it. Holding court like a manic Fagin, Waits sets loose enough Oliver Twists & Artful Dodgers to live up to it's title.

Thoughtfully sequenced over 3 discs, Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards says it all. Starting off with the demented Rockabilly of "Lie To Me", Brawlers lies somewhere between 1999's Mule Variations & 2004's "Real Gone". Highlights include the take-no-prisoners, "Fish In The Jailhouse" & a cover of Leadbelly's "Ain't Goin' Down To The Well" that defies easy categorization. Also notable is the gutter Gospel of "Lord I've Been Changed" & the rousing hobo ballad, "Bottom Of The World". While the heart of "Road To Peace" is certainly in the right place, this overtly political treatise quickly wears out its welcome after 1 listen. But despite the monotony of "Peace", things like "Rains On Me" & his barnstorming turn with The Ramones' "Jackie & Judy" are guaranteed to have you coming back for more.

If the unholy onslaught of "Real Gone" alienated any fans of Waits' softer side, Bawlers more than makes up for any ruffled feathers. "You Can Never Hold Back Spring" beautifully harks back to Waits' earlier work while rousing ballads like "Never Let Go Of Your Hand" rank as some of his best. No one spikes a dirge with bittersweet heartbreak like Waits & the likes of "Little Drop OF Poison" & "It's Over" are classics, pure & simple. For those who've heard Johnny Cash's version of "Down There By The Train", fans can finally hear the song in it's entirety. Perhaps Cash felt silly singing "Humptry Jackson" or "Gyp The Blood" but it comes at the expense of, "and Charlie Whitman is holding on to Dillinger's wings". Along with the aformentioned, the world weary "Goodnight Irene" & "If I Have To Go" are sure to make Bawlers the disc that gets the most play in the collection.

By & large Bastards consists of Waits' signature spoken word pieces & some truely ecclectic covers. Brecht/Weill's "What Keeps Mankind Alive" seems tailor made & his take on "Heigh Ho" is the stuff of legend. Here Snow White's cute little friends come off more like pissed off trolls ominously digging their way into hell. Jack Kerouac has always been an acknowledged influence & with "Home I'll Never Be " & "On The Road" Waits presents 2 dramatically different renditions of the same song. Both are indispensible. As is his turn on Skip Spence's apocalyptic, "Books Of Moses". Only Daniel Johnson's "King Kong" is the least welcome. Along with "Road To Peace" it ranks as the most monotonous number on the collection. And if the instrumental "Redrum" sounds like a bunch of kids messing around in Waits' garage---well, that's exactly what it is. As for the spoken word pieces, "First Kiss" is sure to keep you coming back for more. Among the few original songs on this disc, "Altar Boy" gloriously harks back to the drunken heydays of "Piano Has Been Drinking". Elsewhere, "Dog Door" & Spidey's Wild Ride" could've has easily slipped off of "Real Gone". If that weren't enough, Waits has a few hidden surprises in store, sure to appease fans of Nighthawks At The Diner.

All in all, this is the Waits equivalent of Johnny Cash's Unearthed. The motherlode. Move over Teddy Roosevelt, time to chisle Tom's craggy mug up next to the Man In Black on Mt. Rushmore.

Nobody does grizzled and world-weary quite like Tom Waits, and coming off 2004's incredible Real Gone, the mammoth three-disc collection Orphans is yet more proof of his bizarre genius. Even putting aside the abundance of great music it contains, it is, if nothing else, a fitting tribute to Waits's persistently uncommercial, marketing-be-damned approach to his music. Comprised of a whopping 54 songs (both Waits originals and covers) and clocking in at about three hours, Orphans is vintage Waits from beginning to end-unvarnished, unconventional, and uncompromising. Given the enormous amount of variety to be found here, everyone's going to have their personal favorites, but whichever tracks one prefers there's no denying that Orphans makes the perfect testament to Waits's endless creativity, stinging wit and gritty, PhD-in-life sensibility.

Waits has long been a a man of many personas-demented carnival barker, old testament prophet, Jesus freak, depression-era bluesman-and even more than his more traditional albums Orphans shows off his chameleonic nature to the fullest extent. With its ample available space, Orphans allows Waits to induldge in genre exercises ranging from rockabilly (Lie To Me); to baroque pop (Little Drop of Poison); to swamp blues (Buzz Fledderjohn); to gospel (Lord I've been changed) without ever sounding like just an imitator of his varied influences. That said, Waits is still at his best when he dwells in a musical territory all his own, be it noisy, free-form experimentation or more reflective, sparsely instrumented balladry.

Each disc brings with its own unique feel, with the first one feeling the most like a proper Waits album in the vein of such all-encompassing classics as Rain Dogs and Bone Machine. Waits gets his classic-rock fix taken are of early with the scorching Low Down, whose big, brash guitar riffs wouldn't sound out of place in the '60's. The clamorous percussion and dizzying time signatures of Fish in the Jailhouse should please fans of Waits's more eccentric side, or just those like this writer who crave something abrasive and weird. Providing a sharp contrast to these tunes, but still very much in line with Waits's overall approach, are the downcast resignation of the bluesy, guitar-driven Road to Piece (a seven-minute examination of the conflict in Israel) and the closing lament of Rains on Me.

The ballad-heavy second disc, while occasionally a tad forgettable, is still home to some of the most brilliant material of Waits's career. The triumphant Take Care of All of My Children is driven by a stirring, martial drum beat, while the following Down There by the Train manages to expertly combine sadness, regret, and hope through Waits's singularly poetic lyrical imagery ("There's no eye for an eye/There's no tooth for a tooth/I saw Judas Iscariot carryin' John Wilkes Booth"-brilliant). In somewhat of a curveball for Waits, Never Let Go is inspiring and poignant in its straightforward message of devotion. There's also a great, booze-sodden lament in Goodnight Irene, which finds Waits's nicotine-stained voice at its most raw and unhinged.

The third disc is a nod to every side of the schizophrenic last two decades of Waits's career, with unstructured noise explorations (the mutant jazz-blues-rock workout Heigh Ho is hard-edged and ominous even for Waits) to a slew of spoken-word pieces to some more tender ballads. Waits starts off the disc by breaking out his classic rasp on the delightfully malevolent What Keeps Mankind Alive, and backs himself up with some inspired vocal beat-boxing on the Spidey's Wild Ride and King Kong. The latter track is especially interesting, with Waits's pained wail augmented by some ear-piercing guitar squeals and a subterranean bass line as he declaims the tragic story of, well, King Kong, with all the gravity of a character delivering the closing monologue of a Shakespearean tragedy.

This is simply a stunning collection of great music. The most amazing thing about it is that it doesn't contain much that can compare with his very, very best work. There is nothing to compare with the best cuts on RAIN DOGS, for instance. But imagine any Tom Waits album. Knock off the top one or two songs and then imagine the next two or three best songs. This three CD set pulls together some 50-odd songs of that quality, just a staggering number of very good songs. And weirdly enough, at some point sheer quantity does become quality. After RAIN DOGS and perhaps SWORDFISHTROMBONES, well maybe CLOSING TIME as well, this just might be the next most essential Tom Waits album. It provides an incredible overview to everything his music is about and provides examples of nearly every form at which he excels.

This is not a perfect collection. For instance, there are far too many spoken-word cuts, a form I've never been fond of with any artist, though I will add that Waits is better than most. One wonders if this would have been better as a two-CD collection. Still, even the filler is high quality filler. And although there is nothing on this album that will count among my very favorite songs ever, as do other Waits songs like "Downtown Train," "Time," "Yesterday is Here," or "Blind Love," there are a huge number of wonderfully compelling songs. As I write this, for instance, I've been listening to "World Keeps Turning" and "Tell It to Me." These are not among the very best cuts on the set, but they are nonetheless immensely satisfying to listen to.

The most astonishing thing about this set of what is basically a collection of rarities, many of them re-recorded for this album, is the sheer quantity. This much exceedingly good music makes you wonder if Waits, despite his already high acclaim, has been underrated. This is the kind of set that we are used to Dylan releasing, a set of occasional pieces, things that in one way might almost be considered "B" material, but that are superior to most performers' "A" stuff.

I personally like the first two discs more than the third, though even it has some great cuts. As I mentioned above, I'm just not a fan of spoken-word songs and most of them are on the final disc. Virtually every cut on the first two discs is at least decent and most are far more than that. I could list some of my favorites, but there wouldn't be much of a point; there are just too many fine songs. Let me just say this: if you are a fan of Tom Waits, you must -- and I really do mean you really, truly must -- own this album. In fact, it truly belongs on the short list of essential discs. It is an anthology, but an anthology of stuff that is more or less inaccessible. Many Waits fans were looking forward to this set, but the great news is that it exceeds expectations.

Where do I start? Despite the general strength of Tom's more recent work for Anti, still we have not heard material quite this sharp or focused since Bone Machine or perhaps Mule Variations. The "Brawlers" CD alone is worth the price of this entire set of outtakes, dense with one riotous stomp after another and brimming over with the kind of biting lyrical turns that are characteristic of Waits's superior ability as a songwriter.

Some of the work here may be familiar to committed fans: the brilliant "Walk Away" appeared on the "Dead Man Walking" sounstrack, while "Books of Moses" is a cover of a Skip Spence tune from a tribute album to that doomed legend of Moby Grape and Jefferson Airplane fame. Similarly, other performances here surfaced on the Liberty Heights Soundtrack, an album of Jack Kerouac rants, and a benefit CD for the infamous case of "The Memphis Three," but this set rocks even without those great numbers.

Waits is at the top of every game he's ever played here--some of the ballads here among the finest he's ever done, with the gorgeous "Long Walk Home" and "Shiny Things" leading the pack, but the bones 'n holler sound he mastered on Bone Machine and Real Gone emerges in full bloom here as well on instantly addictive thrashers like "Ain't Goin' Down to the Well," the bitingly political "Road to Peace" or his rollicking cover of Jack Kerouack's song "On the Road," a tune on which he receives a little help from Primus.

In recent years, fans have been treated to sprawling sets of outtakes by some of the most recognized artists around, such as Dylan, Springsteen, The Cure and Pearl Jam, but this Waits set outdoes all of them combined. This is a truly amazing testament to a talent whose boundlessness even his most devoted fans may not have fully recognized until now.

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This review is for people considering the seemingly steep $45 price tag--since I know that loyal Waits fans will pay any price. All three discs are worth the price of a normal disc, since each has 16 or 20 songs. This isn't a greatest hits album or updated old tunes but a collection of new songs that span what has to be the widest variety of musical genres that one artist has dared put into one release.

Tom Waits gets classified into "Folk" by many music services, but this appellation must equate to a musical wild card, the "thing" in a noun's "person, place, or thing" that covers everything you can't nail down as standard. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan are probably the only qualified personnel who can set these gems into a particular category-- [...]. I would create a new genre called "Carnival Gothic" or "Barroom Classical," but they would still fall short.

Suffice it to say that each song takes you on a journey outside of your daily routine. That walk may cross into melancholy territory, but you emerge changed, and that's what great art does. In these 56 songs you will be introduced to characters who are desperate, nostalgic, and endearing--they tell the story of the old man in the corner of the bar, the crazy lady in the desert antique store, and the vagrant ex-con in the back of the boxcar--stories self-preservation and sanity kept you from hearing. It stands alone as an incredible addition to his vast 30+ year opus that I hope will continue to grow. Each of these three discs will be played as often as my other single Tom Waits albums. I'm so happy to have three hours of new Tom Waits to listen to you'd think it was Christmas Morning.

Well if you were on the fence about purchasing this album, hopefully I snuck up and pushed you off.

Tom Waits has bestowed unto his fans a great gift with ORPHANS, his new 3 CD opus of lost and found treasures from his vaults. To a long time fan like myself, it's a staggering amount of material to ingest and digest, and after several weeks, I think I can finally share some thoughts on it.

I was originally wary of the fact that the material was broken up into three distinct parts. One of the pleasures of a Waits set is how the feral blues tracks play off the sentimental ballad, which plays off the twisted spoken yarn. After listening, I can say that I'm not too put off at all by the Brawlers (the more up-tempo material) and the Bawlers (the twisted Tin Pan Alley types), but find the Bastards a little less enjoyable as a whole. Not that the BASTARDS are devoid of good material, but the unrelenting strangeness does not pull this listener back for repeated listens.

That being said this is a mother lode of classics from the Barking Bard. Having this much A grade material in the vault just highlights the fact that Waits is one of the top artists of these times. Personal favorites include DOWN THERE BY THE TRAIN, LOWDOWN, THE ROAD TO PEACE, WORLD KEEPS TURNING and his two great Ramone's covers DANNY SAYS AND THE RETURN OF JACKIE AND JUDY. The song ROAD TO PEACE is a political song concerning the Israeli-Palestinian situation, quite out of character from it's author, but also one of the best political songs I've encountered. And catchy too!

While far from perfect, this set remains a treasure trove for most of Waits fans, especially those who have embraced the later half of his career, where I believe most of these tracks have come. I wish the booklet would have had more information on the origins and recording dates of the songs, but that's a minor complaint. I'll take the two solid disks of great music and one of interesting, if flawed experiments anytime

No buyer's regret here - I now have plenty to listen to at work over the next few weeks, and probably a lot of the songs will grow on me. Still, printed lyrics would have been nice, considering the $50 I paid to have this album imported. ("Deluxe Edition" ...? Um, give me a break.) As for the songs, I'd say if you took the best offerings from all 3 albums, released as one 12-song album, you'd have something almost equal to Bone Machine (which is a hell of an endorsment, as Waits fans will know.) Not much was left on the cutting room floor at all, it'd seem, which is not all to the good ... there are misses here, no mistake, some songs (mainly disc 3) which are plain boring (eg, "Lucinda", "What keeps mankind alive") or maybe even not actually songs but the soundtrack to Waits's eccentricity (including some spoken-word stuff with little or no music.)

The gems are gems, though: "Goodnight Irene", "Lie to me", "Low Down", "Lord I've been changed", "Bottom of the world", "Long Way Home," ... these are songs as good as any he's recorded. Mixes of folk, bluesy stuff, 50s rock'n'roll, some surprising covers (including the Ramones) all with Waits's own unique gritty style and strange compassion. They make this album a must-have.

It's a lot of dough to fork over for one album, though, and whether the total material was strong enough for 3 discs is maybe up for question. Still, glad it's in the collection.

My only beef is with the sequencing. I like Tom's ballads, but I'm less inclined to listen to a dozen in a row. I'm interested in Wait's more aggressive and experimental tracks, so naturally I prefer discs 1 and 3. Also, a project like this, made up of rarities and oddballs, demands extensive liner notes, info on who did what, when the tracks were recorded, etc. The hefty booklet here only gives us a general list of the musicians involved. I want the whole story. That being said, there are plenty of great recordings, more than enough to justify the price of admission. While I'm commenting, let me say that Waits, whose voice and performance style are often praised, doesn't get near enough recognition for his skills as a producer. Tom's ability to manipulate sound is astounding, especially to a novice home recording enthusiast like me. Through the use of unique instruments, inventive recording techniques, unusual sound sources and a whole lot of trail and error, Tom Waits creates records with a variety of textures unequalled by any other producer's body of work. Orphans is a smorgasbord of studio magic. Can you think of any other musician who can create the sound of paint peeling and iron rusting?

For the first two discs, this doesn't sound like a collection of tracks ranging from all over Waits' career that have been sitting on the butcher's floor--at least, other artists' collections of stuff that never made it onto previous albums have come across as inconsistent, for obvious reasons.

It would seem odd that Waits could overcome such shortcomings in such a collection, for the man has had such a long and artistically varying career, but there are at least two things working in Waits' favor for _Orphans_, aside from his ungodly level of talent: first, many of these tracks are not simply ones that didn't make the final cuts of his other albums. Waits has been a long contributor to soundtracks and variously themed albums--tributes, anthologies, etc. So rather than be tracks that others may have thought inadequate (and rightfully so), this collection contains strong tracks that have appeared on other albums, for example his legendary version of "Heigh Ho" from _Snow White_ which was done for a Disney tribute album that had contained such talents as Sinead O'Connor, Sun Ra and others. Also on here is "Poor Little Lamb," a song he put together for the movie _Ironweed_. So many of these tracks had simply not come out on a Waits-exclusive album...until now.

Also, Waits has established himself as such an eclectic artist, starting with closing-time growls in his early work to vastly intricate and avant-garde mini-operas. Waits pulled these stages together into a cohesive vision of him as a single artist with _Mule Variations_. Thus, Waits established himself as an artist able to explore his whole history of sound in one album, allowing this collection to sound very cohesive, as an expression of the work of a singular artist.

Waits also made this collection cohesive by grouping songs into tonal categories: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. Brawlers and Bawlers chould be pretty self-explanatory, though Bastards feels more like a disjointed collection disc than the others. I can listen to the first two discs as though enjoying the latest recordings by Mr. Waits, but Bastards seemed to become the repository for anything that couldn't fit easily into a category.

I will readily admit that Waits' work defines easy categorization, and so a disjointed collection like Bastards readily admits with its own title that this kind of disconnection should only help define this man's work, but it always seemed that Waits himself found ways to offer cohesive albums, whether through storylines as in _Frank's Wild Years_ or a simple tonal connection like there is among the songs on _Real Gone_.

Don't get me wrong--I will be listening to all three of these discs with pleasure again and again. Tom Waits is perhaps one of the most unique and immediately recognizable voices that we have--a little bit Louis Armstrong in its gruff and pathos, a little bit Brecht in its mechanicism and baroque tightness, and more than a little bit stinky man at the end of the bar. He is, perhaps, the most quintessential American artist we have today, and I would love to play everything he's done to every foreigner who thinks he knows what America is about.