Shop Ireland

Blood Money by: Tom Waits

Click to tell a friend about this item...

More Product Details...

Review Pages: 1 2 3 Next »

Click here to add a review!

Average rating -

Rating: - Dont Forget Kathleen.

I can go one better than the Amazon review,i think this is the greatest album ever not just lyrically,but the marriage of instruments and emotions is pure genius.Thank you Tom and Kathleen this album has truelly enriched my life.

Rating: - Woyzeck by any other name

The least focused of all waits' musical soundtracks, this one is from the Robert wilson play `woyzeck'. There are some of Wait's best growlers here, as he gives voice to low life, morally abandoned characters. Lyrically dark throughout, the music varies between jaunty, fast paced jazz, to functional ballads, to some of his fiercest recordings, often with a hint of vaudeville, which some will love and some will hate. This seems to come about through a lack of cohesion however, rather than through an attempt at diversity, many songs having a `left over from another album' feel. Some great songs but more that are mediocre.

Rating: - Best Tom Waits album?

Tom Waits takes on the persona of a demented carnival barker in the fairground from Hell singing songs of despair, (All the good in the world, You can put inside a thimble, And still have room for you and me), the absence of God, (God's away on business), and infidelity, (Another man's vine). The best moment on the album comes early on, in Misery is the river, with Tom exhorting "Everybody Row! Everybody row!"
A fantastic album of strange, haunting tunes and wonderful lyrics. Possibly my favourite Tom Waits album.

Rating: - Soundtrack to a soldier's despair.

Like the Black Rider and Alice albums before it, Blood Money was initially produced for one of avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson's conceptual literary adaptations, in this case, his 2000 production of Georg Büchner's 1838 abstract allegory, Woyzeck. As with those particular albums, we get something of a loose concept... here distilling the bare-bones of the original play's narrative (which involves a low-ranking soldier driven mad by government behavioural experiments and his wife's infidelity) into something that goes much deeper into the primary ideas of human isolation, madness, murder, betrayal, confusion, and the overwhelming need for love and redemption. Unlike many other song-writers, Waits is able to reinterpret the play on a more personal level, creating an album that is as emotionally affecting as past works, like Small Change and Closing Time, without allowing the material to become too self-conscious or too conceptually affected.

As with most of Waits' work post-Swordfishtrombones, Blood Money relies heavily on a bizarre and continually unnerving sound that moves schizophrenically between lulled piano ballads, lightly-tinged jazz and screaming Weimar cabaret tracks, with the emphasis of the vocals, the use of instrumentation and the overall quality of the production all going into the creation of an atmosphere that further relates to the themes and motifs behind the music perfectly. As a result, Blood Money can and should be seen as a complete piece of work... an album that uses not only the songs themselves, but also the arrangements, production, delivery and art-design, to help evoke a certain time, place and atmosphere for this mini-operetta of corruption and loss to unfold (...the same thing can be said about the aching and wistful Alice and the grim and grimy Bone Machine). Opening track, Misery is the River of the World, opens with a clatter of percussion that brings to mind the use of the "boners" on that aforementioned 1992 masterpiece, before the song moves off into more elaborate and abstract directions.

Many of the songs draw on the carnival M.C. persona that Waits let loose on the classic brass band stomp In the Neighbourhood and further refined with songs like In The Coliseum and the Reeperbahn, as he chants vocals over a giddy and disorientating swirl of guitars, pianos, brass, strings, double-bass, gongs, congas, bongos, drums, calliopes, organs and accordions, all the while offering up harsh and uncompromising lyrics that brim with poetry, pathos and a sinister streak of humour. His vocals reflect the stylistic moods of the music perfectly, with his voice adding character to the songs by switching rebelliously between grazed and throaty howls and those more familiar low and smoky croons to really help draw us into the world of the album. The whole thing is just perfect to me; managing to capture the spiralling tragedy and despair at the heart of Büchner's play, but also working as a rock album in the traditional sense. You don't have to be that familiar with Büchner, or indeed, Wilson's adaptation, to be able to enjoy the songs on this set, with Waits tapping into the universal themes behind this sad and sorry character's descent into personal hell.

Right from the opening track, Waits is playing with bizarre imagery shot through with a mad man's perspective. For example, Misery is the River of the World finds the singer bemoaning the injustices of the universe over a circus stomp, with lyrics like "all the good in the world you could put inside a thimble / and still have room for you and me" capturing the surrogate Woyzeck's need for love in a world brimming with confusion, whilst a line like "if there's one thing you can say about mankind / there's nothing kind about man" takes on a whole new relevance in a world torn apart by terrorism, apathy and fear. Many of the songs take on a further degree of relevance for those familiar with Werner Herzog's masterful adaptation of Woyzeck from 1978, with the sense of loss and confusion lurking within some of the more restrained songs, such as Coney Island Baby, Lullaby and Woe, reminding me of the scene in which Kinski falls into the grass, terrified of the rumbling sounds he imagines bubbling up from beneath the soil, or the scene of heartbreaking disenchantment in which Eva Mattes tells the story of the last girl on earth to the kids in the town square.

Many of the songs capture the feeling of spiralling despair central to the play, but at the same time, tap into the key concerns at the heart of Waits' best known works (soul-searching, jealously, lust, love, loss and hopelessness). Other highlights include All The World Is Green, God's Away on Business and The Part You Throw Away, but really, the album works best as a complete piece of work, with the record as a whole capturing the mood and the atmosphere of Büchner's play, whilst the songs themselves (by Waits and his wife & muse Kathleen Brennan) come together to form the basis of a great Tom Waits album!! The songs carry the concept well, with the early songs hinting at the idea of heartache and betrayal, whilst standout track Woe uses it's lone verse to hint at the perverse beauty of despair and the dark centre at the heart of the original play ("the ribbon round your neck / against your skin that's pale as bone / it's my favourite thing you've worn / the band is playing our song / and we won't go home / ...till morn").

A Good Man is Hard to Find is the perfect way to end, with Waits' bringing the album to a close with a song that sounds like it's centuries old, with musical nods to 20's jazz and Waits' raspy voice moaning that great refrain "...my favourite colour is red", which manages to suggest so much about the idea of madness in the face of murder, and the sense of loss and redemption so central to the Woyzeck character. Blood Money is fantastic stuff... a fascinating and at times moving collection of songs, and another potential candidate for the title of "the greatest Tom Waits' album ever!!".

Rating: - Blood Money

Great Tom Album no doubt. Fans of his earlier work may not like, or those perhaps being introduced for the first time..He does sound like he's just got out of the asylum ..but the more you listen the more you find little Tom gems through out.

Review Pages: 1 2 3 Next »

Search terms used to get here:

• blood