Ouch
Well well, Tom Waits' Real Gone certainly is an interesting CD to listen to. Tom Waits has been around in the music world for nigh on thirty years now, and if this album is of the same quality as the rest of his vast back catalogue, I seriously wonder how he's managed to keep his finger in the music industry pie for so long.
I won't lie to you, some of the songs here are complete tripe. Notable examples include Sins Of My Father - a ten minute song featuring unchanging musical accompaniment throughout, so once you're about one minute into the song you have actually heard it all, no hyperbole required. Shake It is another one, its out-of-tune, distorted-guitar counter melody acting like a spanner thrown in the mechanics of a song that, minus this awful addition, sounds pretty repetitive any way.
Don't even get me started on Waits' voice. I'll admit it, I'm not the most knowledgeable person in the music industry, far from it, and I've never even heard a Tom Waits song before this, only hearing him sing on the Primus track Tommy the Cat, but his vocals seriously hurt to listen to for an extended period of time. In small doses, his voice is fine, actually adding to the bluesy feeling that many of his songs have, but once you get about thirty minutes into this seventy minute album, I guarantee that you will be sick of it. Actually, I think it might be misleading to call it singing, at least singing of the conventional kind anyway, as his extremely husky growl sounds like he belongs to some kind of jazz club from the start of the 20th century.
After the first six tracks, Waits starts to move away from his songs which sound as if he traveled back in time to the cotton-picking fields of slave-labour America, and he moves forward in time to the seedy blues bars of the night. Dead and Lovely is a fair example of this sound, and turns out to actually be one of the best songs on the album. Waits' other main problem beside his voice is his love of repetition - the majority of the songs on this album could easily be cleaved in half, and the sound of the album as a whole would be exactly the same, only more far easy on the ears.
The ninth track, Circus, is a kind of interlude to the album, consisting of a story told by Waits through phone voice-effect modulator, with a simple xylophone and synth melody creating an eerie backdrop.
The rest of the album contains even more repetition - surprise, surprise - and even more blues-clone music, which is no doubt why there's so much repetition, fair enough, but this kind of music just won't wash in today's modern world. Waits should be applauded for making something different, but just because it’s different doesn't mean that it's any good. This is for true Tom Waits fans only; anyone else will just hate it. Sorry, Tom.