Swordfishtrombones
by Tom Waits£6.37 Free Shipping
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- Released
- 01/06/1989
- Music Genre
- Folk, Rock
Description
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. Swordfishtrombones had 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 Waits) that sometimes were better described as "soundscapes." Lyrically, Waits' tales of the drunken and the lovelorn had been replaced by surreal accounts of people who burned down their homes and of Australian towns bypassed by the railroad -- a world (not just a neighborhood) of misfits now had his attention. The music could be primitive, moving to odd time signatures, while Waits alternately howled and wheezed in his gravelly bass voice. He seemed to have moved on from Hoagy Carmichael and Louis Armstrong to Kurt Weill and Howlin' Wolf (as impersonated by Captain Beefheart). Waits 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 bestseller charts, like most of Waits' albums, and now that he was with a label based in Europe, even charted there. Artistically, Swordfishtrombones marked an evolution of which Waits had not seemed capable (though there were hints of this sound on his last two Asylum albums), and in career terms it reinvented him.
Product Details
- Artist
- Tom Waits
- Year of release
- 1989
- Label / Studio
- POL
- Media Content Format
- Album
- WOW HD Sales Rank
- #8178
- Media Format
- Audio CD
- Recording Environment
- Studio
- Number of Discs
- 1
- Run Time (minutes)
- 40
- Original year of release
- 1983
- CD 30days Sales Rank
- #6266
- Cast & Crew
- Tom Waits (Music Performer)
- Tom Waits (Producer)
- Biff Dawes (Sound Engineer)
Press Reviews
Ranked #16 among The 50 Greatest Albums Of The '80s. NME (9/25/93, p.19)
5 Stars - Indispensable - "...one of the pivotal albums of the '80s...an American melting-pot music such as had never been heard before... Q (10/92, p.100)
Tracklisting
Disc 1:
-
Underground
-
Shore Leave
-
Dave the Butcher [Instrumental]
-
Johnsburg, Illinois
-
16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six
-
Town with No Cheer
-
In the Neighborhood
-
Just Another Sucker On the Vine [Instrumental]
-
Frank's Wild Years
-
Swordfishtrombone
-
Down, Down, Down
-
Soldier's Things
-
Gin Soaked Boy
-
Trouble's Braids
-
Rainbirds [Instrumental]
