Chicago

Man, the new Tom Waits album is so good. It’s his best in years. Of course, Tom Waits isn’t capable of making anything bad. He is simply never anything less that fascinating. We’d pay to hear him read a scientific paper about ants, which he did on the Orphans triptych. That behemoth had things going for it, but it was also a case of overload and exhaustion. Exhaustion for the listener dealt three discs worth of Waits showing how weird he can be. At 13 tracks Bad As Me is no longer or shorter than average, but it zips by on high energy. Waits sounds like he’s having mad fun barking, growling and even crooning. It’s also a benefit that there’s no grand idea or theme besides the usual things that Tom Waits likes; booze, coffee and lonely nights. On the uptempo numbers he sounds like a Mad Hatter gone to seed. He lets out some stomping aggression, with assistance from kindred pirate Keith Richards. Don’t forget the ballads either, they’re some of his best love songs, all about memory and regret, maybe with a rusty sliver of hope.

The Ghost of Liberace

I’ll admit I actually find this song a bit grating. But it represents very well late-career Sparks. In which they’ve come to rely on a specific formula. Maybe I’m wrong about their creative process, but it seems like they first come up with the randomest song title they can think of and work from there. Sometimes it’s just Russ chanting the song title/joke over an endlessly repetitive synth melody. Here there’s a full set of lyrics in narrative formation, and they’re pretty damn funny. Love the formula or hate it, those guys have never lost their sense of humor. Sometimes they can be annoying but there’s always a good joke in there somewhere. I do miss early Sparks, when they were a full band with guitars and drums. They must have figured out keeping a stable of supporting players was too much trouble when all they ever needed was Ron’s keyboard and a mic for Russell. Now they’re the world’s only electronic music parody duo. But they’re not parodists in the Weird Al sense. They’re not interested in deflating whatever the next big thing is. They just write whatever they think is amusing. The youngest among you might not understand what makes this song funny. It’s funny because Liberace is such an absurd personality. If you don’t remember, for a few decades starting in the 1940′s he ruled Vegas as a kind of smarmier version of Elton John. That is: flamboyant, sparkly, tacky, and piano-based. Also gay, but unlike Sir Elton, never out with it. I read that he’d force his toy-boys to have plastic surgery so they’d look more like him, something Elton John would never dream of doing, because Elton John is married to someone his own age, for one thing, and also because Elton John isn’t a total freaking lunatic like that. Though that whole story may not even be true, who knows. Anyhow, Liberace was a talented showman and pianist, but his horrible taste in everything you can imagine and slimy Vegas persona has made him into a figure of high hilarity, even without anyone coming along to write a song about him.