Bone Machine

Imagine if you would, Tom Waits sitting in a basement room with a cement floor recording these intensely violent, depressing, and chaotic songs. His voice would reverberate against the hot water heater keeping him company, the clanging bones of percussion echoing on the hard ground. One would think that Waits would go insane, but he's the kind of artist who doesn't shy away from the horrors of death, he actively embraces them and warps his mind around the darkness around him.

Bone Machine, his tenth album and first in five years, is yet another taxing and demanding listen from the blues demon himself. Far from an accessible listen, Waits instead is closer to intentionally alienating those without the stomach to stand the acid he spews. The alienation may come from the abysmal poetry Waits conjures up from the darkest places of his mind, or from the stripped back and minimalist instrumentation that faintly accompanies the words. Whatever it might be, once you have arrived it's hard to turn back without being affected.

Waits sounds like a wild man on the microphone here, his grizzled growl on its usual display, but when utilized for such evil forces it takes on a new kind of tone. He raises the pitch on the lonely Dirt in the Ground, sounding like a wounded animal stuck in a bear trap. He amps it up quickly after on Such a Scream, flailing himself around among the blues rock instrumentation. He even takes on a ghostly and distant specter on The Ocean, speaking to the listener over harrowing noises, or on In the Colosseum which makes Waits sound like an executioner watching over the deaths of a whole society. He even takes on his piano balladry for the first time in awhile on songs like A Little Rain or Whistle Down the Wind. Waits has the rarity of his unique voice not becoming tiring because he is capable of using it in so many different ways.

Understandably praised as one of his best, and effectively standing out from the rest of his experimental work in a completely different way, Bone Machine will grind you down into sediment, eroding from the horrors around you. It by no means is the kind of album I would recommend just to anyone, and even if that limits his audience it doesn't limit the striking nature of the album.

Favorite track: Goin' Out West