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The middle album of the trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years, Rain Dogs is Waits's best overall effort. The songs are first-rate, and there are a lot of them--19 in all, ranging from grim nightlife memoirs ("9th and Hennepin," "Singapore") to portraits of small-time hustlers ("Gun Street Girl," "Union Square") to bursts of street-corner philosophy ("Blind Love," "Time"). The album also contains the original version of "Downtown Train," which Rod Stewart turned into a smash hit. The image of "rain dogs"--animals who've lost their way home because the rain has washed away their scent--is an appropriate symbol for the entire cast of characters Waits has brought to life over the years, and this album has thus far proved to be his most enduring effort. --Daniel Durchholz
Customer Review: a very varied album, one of the best records of the 80s
this is one of the coolest albums i own. I think this is really where Waits started perfecting his stranger musical writings, but there's still plenty of room for the sligtely more normal songs of his earlier style. begining with the see shanty singapore, waits uses his idiosyncratic voice in a great way with the chanting, and the malets are awesome. one of my favorites on the album is clap hands, which uses mallets again, but perhaps in an even cooler way than on singapore. this song has some of the most interesting lyrics on the record, my favorite line being 'a Cincinatti jacket and a sad luck dame; hanging out the window with a bottle full of rain.' the song creates an atmosphere of the most exagerated old school urban decadence, completely grey and raw. cemetary polka sees chanting again, but somehow the style is quite different than on clap hands. to me the coolest part of the delivery of waits is his ability to use his voice to conjure so many different sounds and emotions. this record goes from the delicacy of time to the surreal bark of cemetery polka, desperate and intense on anywhere i lay my head, and swinging and groving on walking spanish and jockey full of bourbon. and just as his voice itself is varried, so too are the song styles, instrumentation, and overall feel the songs give off. somehow waits is able to go from popular music to avant garde strangness so fast and so smoothly that he creates a sound totaly his own on totaly different songs. if you told me waits had multiple personality disorder problems around the recording of this record i might believe you. as this record is in the middle of his discography i think it is one of the most essential, it just showcases so much. one thing i think people have to realize is that there wasn't a perfect point when Waits started playing very strange music, and to me that slowely happened until his albums became more consistantly in one style again. some of the songs here are very weird, such as diamonds and gold, but others are pop songs, such as downtown train. i suppose not everyone will feel this is a good thing, this album doesn't have the emotional or concistancy, nor the pure strangness of an album like Blood Money, but it probably has better songs. get it.
Customer Review: OF DRIFTERS, GRIFTERS, HIPSTERS AND SUCH
If, as I do, every once in a while from a distance you need to hear about boozers, losers, dopesters, hipsters, fallen sisters, grifters, drifters, the driftless, small-time grafters, hoboes, bums, tramps, the fallen, those who want to fall, Spanish Johnnies, stale cigarette butts, whiskey-soaked barroom floors, loners, the lonely, sad sacks, the sad and others at the margins of society then this is your stop. Tom Waits gives voice in song to the characters that peopled Nelson Algren's novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). In short, these are the people who do not make revolutions, far from it, but they surely desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial voice and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who, with far more justification that ex- President Bill Clinton could possibly muster, "feels your pain" for his characters you are home. And that, my friends, is definitely a political statement.


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