Review Summary: Tom Waits creates an atmospheric album that is surprisingly cohesive despite its inconsistencies.
The moon is in the street and it is later then you would like it to be. You find yourself in a dingy old diner with a plate of eggs and sausage and a side of toast in front of you. From seemingly out of nowhere a man sits a few stools down from you. He is wearing a cigarette smoke and whiskey cologne and his clothes are wet and dripping onto the floor from the rain outside. With a soft growl he orders a coffee and begins to strike up a conversation with you. Rather mundane at first, about the weather and the game last night. But he begins to pull you in. Before you know it the man starts telling you these bizarre yet intriguing tales of low-lifes. The kind of people you would cross the street to avoid. Noises in the diner begin to create an ambiance that drifts along behind the secondhand stories he is telling. Forks clashing against plates, the man at the other end of the bar chewing a bit too loudly, the waitress pouring herself another cup of coffee and the light platter of rain on the street that is occasionally broken up by a car splashing through a puddle. Rain Dogs is an album that is very similar to this. Listening to it brings about a certain mood. At times it is grungy and off-putting, others it is poetic and comforting. What it always is however is entrancing.
That is the almost magical power that works of art can have upon its audience: an ability to sweep you up in its splendor and let you forget about the world around you. Art is inherently subjective. Sure there are some aspects of it that are generally more appealing to a common audience, but in the end it all comes down to personal opinion. To some, good art has to be digestible to the general public and to others it has to have a deeper meaning. Many just want to be entertained and do not care about the technical quality behind the art. For me, exceptional works of art makes you get lost in their atmosphere. They take you away to another place and engross you in the world they have created. There is not one singular aspect of a piece of art that can accomplish this either; rather it is the culmination of all the pieces at play.
Tom Waits is an artist who heavily focuses his work on atmosphere. Each of his albums in some way gives his audience the feeling of being transported into another world. Throughout his career he has experimented and changed up his style but has never sacrificed his ability to tell captivating scenarios. Waits early albums like Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) have the uncanny ability to transport the listener into a smoky nightclub where you are watching an eccentric beatnik jazz singer performing. Shortly after he decided to make his onstage persona a drunkard and shifted towards a more blues inspired style of music. Then in 1983 in order to keep himself from getting stale he began to experiment with more musical styles and instruments that he was unfamiliar with. The result was Swordfishtrombones, his most experimental venture to date. This release was a rather manic percussion based album that although takes a few drunken stumbles here and there, remains an absolutely essential record in his discography.
Rain Dogs soon followed in 1985 and feels like a natural progression from his previous record. Traces of his drunken stumbling do still remain from Swordfishtrombones but this time Waits has an unrelenting swagger which distracts his audience from really caring. Rain Dogs is a record that is cohesive in its inconsistencies. Each track is different yet familiar enough to one another that nothing seems out of place. Songs featured here like Gun Street Girl, Tango Till They’re Sore, and Clap Hands sound like they are the results of jam sessions from drifters playing with trashcans on a rundown street corner. While others like Downtown Train and Hang Down Your Head could be confused as covers of Bruce Springsteen B-sides. Herein lays the beauty of Tom Waits’ music. You never know exactly what an album of his will sound like, but it will feature a mixture of styles and influences and will sweep you away into another world.
Rain Dogs as a whole relies heavily on percussion based instrumentation. Tom Waits threw everything he could get his hands on into the recording of this work. And when he ran out of instruments or they weren’t giving him a particular sound he had envisioned, he resorted to unconventional techniques like banging a 2x4 against a door to achieve his desired effect. This unusual method of recording is displayed on the record beautifully as the spirit of these off the wall techniques come across in the standard instrumentation used here. Each loud crash of a drum or clanking of the marimba delivers such a punch that you can feel it rattling inside your body. It sounds organic and homemade. As if each note was a stream of conscious motion from the artist. String based instruments like the guitar and banjo are rarely in the forefront of the music on Rain Dogs. Whenever they do pop up however they leave an enormous impact by helping to morph the piece into a particular musical style. Blind Love features a twangy guitar played by none other than Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, which when paired with Tom Waits’ crooning on the track creates a relaxing country ballad. On the other hand, when the guitar appears on Big Black Mariah and Union Square it adds a blues and jazz rock feel to the respective songs. Instrumentation on the record is far from complex for the most part. All the instruments have their time to shine and come across clearly. Nothing overstays its welcome as the music does exactly what it needs to for as long as it needs to do them. The musicianship presented on the individual tracks as well as the album as a whole work together marvelously to create the background ambiance for you to get lost in.
Music itself is only half the reason that Rain Dogs has terrific atmosphere, the other being the lyricism. A great storyteller can even make the most mundane events seem riveting and Tom Waits is no exception. He has the ability to suck you into some of the most bizarre narratives imaginable. He speaks of people and situations which are reminiscent of urban legends that barflies tell to outdo one another. Often times these stories sound like a depraved game of telephone that has been passed along for far too long. Waits spews tales of oddballs and delinquents that would steal the show in some other character’s film. This particular style of lyricism that Waits employs on the record provides a mysterious and alluring atmosphere that is reminiscent of a modern day Grimm’s fairytale. All in all the record comes across as very theatrical. Appropriately enough Tom Waits was living in one of the entertainment capitals of the world when he began pre-production for the album. Rain Dogs recreates the moods of New York City spectacularly which adds to why the record comes across as so organic. The frantic jazz-rock instrumental track Midtown captures the hectic busyness of Midtown Manhattan, while 9th & Hennepin embodies the seediest parts of The Bronx. Waits does not paint the big apple as some gorgeous faraway city that should be placed on a pedestal. Rather he portrays it without rose-tinted glasses and highlights its grimy atmosphere. Unsurprisingly the tracks displayed here feel like New York City and the album is a great representation of the hodgepodge of moods you feel while walking around on its streets.
Rain Dogs is an overall boisterous work, however it does settle down from time to time. In these occurrences of rest one begins to take note of how Tom Waits has a tendency to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. When he is not telling manic stories about pirates on shore leave in Singapore, or an eccentric family on Cemetery Polka, Waits throws in lines of surreal empty poeticism like on the mid-album track Time. No other track on Rain Dogs is able to represent his lyricism quite like this track does. Simplistically beautiful instrumentation highlights the barrage of memorable lines from this song. Which when read in context with one another only sort of makes sense. Akin to someone jamming a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into a space it isn’t meant for. Doing this produces an extremely surreal listening experience which somehow still manages to paint a cohesive picture of the scene he is describing. Sure, not every single line in the songs on the record may flow perfectly into a concrete narrative, but the end result is a rather unique daze for you to slip away into. Rain Dogs is cohesive in its own inconsistencies and wonderfully exemplifies how the whole is only as good as the sum of its parts.
This is a big picture album. One that can be listened to as individual songs; however it will lose some of its magic hearing it in that regard. At times it is ugly and at others it is breathtaking, though it never seems to falter or make you lose interest. You can sit down and try to discover some deeper understanding behind every lyric and analyze the musical composition until some hidden meaning is uncovered behind it all. Doing so would be futile and miss the point entirely. For this album is about a certain mood found in the world it pulls you into. It is about losing yourself in its atmosphere and making the reality we all live in disappear for a brief time. After all that is what all outstanding works of art should achieve.
