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Tom Waits: Glitter & Doom Live

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BY Chris Bilton   November 18, 2009 21:11

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Tom Waits’ voice is the crooner equivalent of an out-of-work character actor giving the weather report from the third panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. This means that an album-length glimpse into the reclusive singer’s “Glitter & Doom” stage show is definitely worth its weight in vocal improvisation. In the same way that Waits’ last live album, Big Time (whose concert film counterpart is still tragically unavailable on DVD), virtually ignored his early-career Asylum recordings in order to indulge his brilliant Frank trilogy, Glitter & Doom Live draws almost exclusively from Waits’ more recent ANTI- catalogue — though even material from Waits’ last studio disc, Real Gone, undergoes an impressive sonic renovation. What’s more, the most represented album (other than the Orphans collection) is 1992’s magnificently apocalyptic Bone Machine, highlighted by a brooding take on Fight Club jukebox staple “Goin’ Out West.” The second disc of “Tom Tales,” though a clever inclusion, isn’t nearly as entertaining as the spoken segments on Big Time and Waits’ episode of VH1’s Storytellers, but serves as a further testament to the talents of this consummate performer.

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