Music

Drop Tom Waits’s name into conversation and you’re guaranteed one of two reactions: either ‘Oh I love him! I’m his biggest fan, I love him way more than you do!’ or ‘Tim who?’ Waits is music’s outsider superstar, the man who can do no wrong in the ears of the world’s serious, frowning music lovers. In fact, if you like Tom Waits, you’ll already have this on pre-order from Amazon and wouldn’t believe us if we gave it a bad review anyway.

Luckily, ‘Orphans’ is great, although in typically obtuse Waitsian fashion, it’s difficult to say whether it’s even a new album or not. Of the 54 tracks on this three-CD set, 30 are previously unheard, but few are entirely new to mankind. Many have been snatched from other people’s records, such as ‘Morning Hollow’, his collaboration with Sparklehorse, or ‘King Kong’, his turn from the Daniel Johnson tribute album. Others are just stuff he had lying around in the shed. These are split into three sets – ‘Brawlers’, the rockin’ numbers, ‘Bawlers’, the sad ballady ones, and ‘Bastards’, which is Tom exploring his weirder side (ie, it all sounds like his last four albums).

At the risk of getting ourselves banned from every bohemian coffee shop in the country, we feel it should be pointed out that Tom’s radically instrumented free-blues odysseys have been getting a bit… well, samey. From ‘Mule Variations’ to ‘Blood Money’, Waits seems to have fallen into a comfortable (if atonal) songwriting pattern.

The good news is that, thanks to the uniquely ramshackle way in which it has been compiled, ‘Orphans’ is the most varied thing he’s done in years. The delight is not just in the oddities, such as hearing him rip through the Ramones’ ‘The Return Of Jackie And Judy’. Sometimes it’s just nice to hear a Tom Waits you thought was gone forever – whether it’s the sly and ballsy honky tonk bluesman rattling through ‘LowDown’ or the heatbroken balladeer crooning rustily through ‘Down There By The Train’. Of course, your enjoyment of ‘Orphans’ will be directly proportional to your existing knowledge of Waits’ music. But as you’re probably the biggest Tom Waits fan in the world, ever, that shouldn’t be a problem for you.