Tom Waits
Bone Machine

THE REVIEW

"Nothing is born from diamonds, flowers are born from manure" F. De André

This is the preface I would have expected when reading the first lines of the booklet of this work, but although our Tom probably doesn't know our national Faber, something subtle ties the artistic paths of the two, and we'll see why.

It starts with a jumble of distant, rhythmic sounds, almost as if they were coming from the underworld, the first track of this album, titled "Bone Machine" which immediately makes the reason clear: a dirty, noisy, damn disorderly rhythm that grows with our singer's vocals, increasingly dirty, tattered, sick, and irresistibly rotten. Such a voice would be capable of narrating exacerbated and submerged worlds, even if it only recited the vowels or in complete silence, just listening to its breathing. We then move to the jazzy, melancholic blues of "Dirt in the Ground" to arrive at the syncopated "Such a Scream", a sort of disjointed, disconnected blues with a snare drum that surprises and hammers greatly.

The album unfolds between rhythmic pieces and slow country-blues ballads ("Who Are You" somewhat in a classic mold) ennobled by the excellent work of the support band that interprets and enriches the ideas of our artist to the fullest. Then comes the dark "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me", a true lugubrious and desperate spoken-song, in a journey in search of the black soul hidden in the shadows. We return with "Jesus Gonna Be Here", yet another desperate chant in the form of a blues prayer seeking an answer to life's malaise. The subsequent "A Little Rain" returns to the stylings of classic country, narrating moments of refined and delicate poetry. And finally, the masterpiece of the album: the gothic "In the Colosseum" with its charge of distorted and chilling sounds, in a slow, heavy, and desperate crescendo, like the approach of a rickety cart loaded with all the imaginable rot, driven by an inspired and cynical Tom Waits, almost a scene from a Tim Burton movie. Moving forward with "Goin' Out West" and then "Murder in the Red Barn", a slow ballad in the style of Nick Cave that narrates the events of a hypothetical murderer through evocative descriptions like dirty watercolors painted on rough and crumpled packing paper. The following "Black Wings" offers no hope and rises high in sharing the miseries of humanity as a whole.

An album desolate and desperately lucid in making poetry by drawing nourishment from the underworld itself, from the void that surrounds us, from the darkness of the soul that can only give the impulse to see beyond, placing us in the condition to look inside ourselves as objectively as possible, without frills and without easy justifications. The CD closes with "That Feel", a sort of swan song, resigned but deep down happy to belong to that small circle of elect who know how to draw poetry and light from impossible or desperate situations, written and played with another "drinking buddy" who has lived these things hand in hand all his life: Keith Richards, the most experienced and most outrageous of the Stones.

A profound and moving album that reaches peaks of the highest sensitivity, revealing poetry and feeling in places where most stop at the "dirt" of raw, stripped sounds (and therefore real), indigestible at first listen and therefore less accessible and listenable by the masses. A parallel journey with that of De André, who, however, preferred the world atmospheres of the ancient Mediterranean ("Crueza de Ma") or the traditional melodies of Italian musicality, more reassuring and accessible to his fans, to the dark and dirty sounds of our artist. Different paths to probably narrate not dissimilar realities which, in the end, are those of one, great, single humanity: thinking about it, who knows what they would have brought to light if the two had met...

"Bone Machine": A masterpiece along with "Real Gone", "Rain Dogs", and "Slowfishtrombones" (but the list would be too long).