After seventeen albums and sixty-one years, you’d think there’d be nothing left to say; or worse, no good way to say it. Tom Waits, now the elder he’d always sought to be, grinds his voice box into tar belting out tales of woe or whoa, pounding dust off the ivories and reintroducing age and eccentric wisdom into the atmosphere. Modern world or not, Waits sounds right at home and Bad As Me, his newest studio offering since 2004’s Real Gone, ties together the lounge act, noir-rator of yore with the gruff-rough-n-tumble lab poet of recent. You can smell the combustion in the air with 'Chicago', the song’s immediate trumpet blasts and vagabond chugga. Waits yelps, “Maybe things will be better in Chicago!” an air of dissatisfaction and uncertainty mustered with Waits mainstay, Marc Ribot, and a Stones-less Keith Richards providing the song’s stringed persistence.
Few possess the sort of magic that Tom Waits manifests, his world still seemingly (and happily) encumbered by second-hand cigarette smoke, hard women, newsprint, death and diesel. While Waits has grown artistically and maintained a remarkable degree of relevance, (as past his prime as he should be), other musicians haven’t aged as gracefully, fumbling along the way and essentially losing the spark. He observes through an exaggerated howl, “You’re the same kinda bad as me!” and you think, “I hope so,” because how fucking cool would that be?
While his cool is hard to dispute, Bad As Me doesn’t really mark any new directions for Waits, creatively speaking. In some ways, one could call the album a career-spanning summary of Waits’ various moods and modes, songs like 'Talking at the Same Time' or 'Kiss Me' utilizing certain vocal harmonies and constructs used in Bone Machine and Real Gone. 'Face to the Highway' is subtle and striking in the same way that 'Sins Of My Father' was, though the approach is less minimal and beautifully percussive.
Even with some notable similarities, however, Waits still exudes a grand sense of folk melancholy with 'Pay Me' and pays Roy Orbison homage with 'Back in the Crowd'. A campy level of noir fuels 'Raised Right Men' and the rousing 'Get Lost' flirts with '50s rockabilly. His shriek heavily remarks via 'Bad As Me' and 'Satisfied', the latter amusingly aided by Richards while Waits offers his due: “I will have satisfaction / I will be satisfied / Now Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards / I will scratch where I’ve been itching / Before I’m gone.” Richards shares vocal duties for 'Last Leaf', a rather inspired pairing of pop royalty providing the album one of its most endearing moments.
While Real Gone gave us 'The Day After Tomorrow' and Orphans had 'Road To Peace', Waits’ penchant for anti-war sentiment is conveyed here through his militaristically vaudevillian 'Hell Broke Luce', an expletive-laced monster of a track wildly narrated like a stream of consciousness: “I had a good home, but I left / left, right, left / that big fuckin’ bomb made me deaf”. Claps and drums, guitar riffs and machine guns, cataclysmic pulsations treated like a pep rally. Waits inquires, “how is it that the only ones responsible for making this mess / got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk?” leaving responsibility in the hands of the suits, soldiers the victims of war.
His compelling anti-war rant is followed by 'New Year’s Eve', closing out Bad As Me with a song about beginning anew. Waits appropriated 'Auld Lang Syne' for the song’s chorus, expressing the understood and universal celebration of the oncoming New Year while he captures the romance of those last seconds of the previous one. Time ticks by, Waits an aging storyteller who will thankfully never have to worry about his mortality.