October 21st, 2011 | 3:02 pm | Thom Jurek
Bad as Me is Tom Waits' first collection of new material in seven years. He and Kathleen Brennan -- wife, co-songwriter, and production partner -- have, at the latter's insistence, come up with a tight-knit collection of short tunes, the longest is just over four minutes. This is a quick, insistent, and woolly aural road trip full of compelling stops and starts. While he's kept his sonic experimentation -- especially with percussion tracks -- Waits has returned to blues, rockabilly, rhythm & blues, and jazz as source material. Instead of sprawl and squall, we get chug and choogle. For "Chicago" -- via Clint Maedgen's saxes, Keith Richards' (who appears sporadically here) and Marc Ribot's guitars, son Casey Waits' drums, dad's banjo, percussion and piano, and Charlie Musselwhite's harmonica (he appears numerous times here, too) -- we get a 21st century take on vintage R&B.; Indeed, one can picture Big Joe Turner fronting this clattering rush of grit and groove, and this album is all about groove. Augie Meyers appears on Vox organ and Flea on bass to guide Waits' tablas and vocals on "Raised Right Men," a 12-bar stagger filled with delightful lyrical clichés from an America that has passed on into myth -- Waits does nothing to de-mystify this; he just makes it greasy and danceable. The slow, spooky "Talking at the Same Time" is still in blues form albeit with ska-styled horns to make things more exotic, as Waits waxes about the current state of economic affairs. He showcases history's circular nature as he bridges our national narrative from 1929-1941, and up to the present day: "Well it’s hard times for some/For others it’s sweet/Someone makes money when there’s blood in the street...Well we bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit/We got the rind..."
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October 13th, 2011 | 2:10 pm | AMG Staff
It was, as they say, the Year Punk Broke -- meaning, it was the year of Nevermind, Nirvana's celebrated second album, the record that changed everything for everyone. This may be true, but Nevermind was on the ascendency in the last quarter of 1991; it did not dominate the year, nor was it the only breakthrough. It was also the year Metallica steamrollered over hair metal with their Black Album, the year R.E.M. hit number one with Out of Time, the year Primal Scream went acid house, the year hip-hop's golden age continued to ride out its peak, the year My Bloody Valentine found ethereal beauty in crushingly loud feedback, the year of new jack swing, the year U2 decided to ditch their Americana mania in favor of late nights at European discos.
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Classical music is not only the art music of western culture, but in a narrower sense, it is the music of a specific time period in Europe, roughly the late 18th to the early 19th century, an era dominated by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. But it takes more than three geniuses to make a musical age, and there's much unknown music to be discovered in this elegant period.
