It’s no wonder the newly compiled Orphans – back-burner outtakes dug up, dusted off (not too thoroughly, of course) and used as inspirational fodder for fresher tracks – arrives as more of a thrill than any past Tom Waits album. After all, it’s always been the sweet in-between shorts, the most indecipherable hog snuffles, the coveted live storytellings that have outshone his more instantly whole and beautiful work.
Not that the new collection is near unrealized. As much as he tries to bully these lost children, bruising and burying their timeless melodies beneath layers of stomp-packed sound-grime (as usual), recklessly batting them into labeled yard-sale bins – Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards – and beating them out in low-tech garage studios, he loves the little devils just as much as the rest of us. Their immortal heat cores are only amplified when strained through found, collected and homemade instruments – most unforgettably, a voice seemingly readied with a gritty cup of steeped red-earth clay and sharpened with rusty piano strings, hanging off steady, cacophony-shelled rhythm like the sad-eye folds of the meanest old hound dog.
The biggest surprises are offered up front, all but busting from disc one. Self-proclaimed Brawlers twist, scratch and elbow their way up from inside Waits’ blue suede shoes (or blood-stained galoshes, or mud-caked conductor’s boots) and out from under his funny hat – the man can dance. Turns out, this exhaustingly eccentric weirdo can also humble himself to banging age-old patterns into the drum set (or rather, let his son Casey do so on “”Lowdown””) and writing political anthems with screaming electric guitar riffs and direct Bush bashes (“”Road to Peace””).
Most of the unearthed recordings of old – “”Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia,”” Waits wrote – show up on the set’s second and third discs. Bawlers revisits Waits’ booze days, when his voice dampened to the point of legibility and dripped over pluckety island strings or his signature smoky-lounge piano. And while covers like the tragic accordion blues of “”Irene Goodnight”” and a deathbed reworking of the Ramones’ “”Danny Boy”” are enough to earn him the throne of Hades, it is on Bastards that Waits is most at home.
Using nothing but larynx-less scratches ripped from a tortured throat, he can tiptoe-creep through the rafters, rifle through the fish market waste pile and catfight with lions. His past throwaways have been transformed into the closest Waits will ever come to a greatest-hits album, his outtakes pigeonholing those along-the-way details that make him so wonderful.
With a flea market this precious available to every kid with $30, Waits can’t hope to long stay hidden out by the railroad tracks, hand-in-hand with the outsider anthems that define him.
