Between the release of
Heartattack and Vine
in 1980 and
Swordfishtrombones
in 1983,
Tom Waits
got rid of his manager, his producer, and his record company. And he drastically altered a musical approach that had become as dependable as it was unexciting.
has none of the strings and much less of the piano work that
Waits
' previous albums had employed; instead, the dominant sounds on the record were low-pitched horns, bass instruments, and percussion, set in spare, close-miked arrangements (most of them by
) that sometimes were better described as "soundscapes." Lyrically,
' tales of the drunken and the lovelorn have been replaced by surreal accounts of people who burned down their homes and of Australian towns bypassed by the railroad -- a world (not just a neighborhood) of misfits now have his attention. The music can be primitive, moving to odd time signatures, while
alternately howls and wheezes in his gravelly bass voice. He seems to have moved on from
Hoagy Carmichael
and
Louis Armstrong
to
Kurt Weill
Howlin' Wolf
(as impersonated by
Captain Beefheart
).
seems to have had trouble interesting a record label in the album, which was cut 13 months before it was released, but when it appeared,
rock
critics predictably raved: after all, it sounded weird and it didn't have a chance of selling. Actually, it did make the bottom of the best-seller charts, like most of
' albums, and now that he was with a label based in Europe, even charted there. Artistically,
marked an evolution of which
had not seemed capable (though there were hints of this sound on his last two
Asylum
albums), and in career terms it reinvented him. ~ William Ruhlmann