Today’s Tom Waits album Bone Machine is brought to you from a nightmare projected from a person screaming inside the bottom of a well. Even in 1992, the year in which Grunge would position itself as the gloomy voice of disinfected youth and Trent Reznor would release his second Broken product under the Nine Inch Nails name, this really is one of the darkest records released in the 90’s outside of black metal, right down to the nightmarish cover that has a similar uncanny aura to that of the first 90’s computer generated faces (the fact that is a photograph genuinely surprises me).
That Nine Inch Nails mention wasn’t for nothing, because Bone Machine has much in the way of the industrial about it. Its title is very apt, because the majority of percussion on this album sounds as if it was produced by hitting femurs onto large workshop equipment. That and the minimal instrumentation gives this an aesthetic that is, as the song title implies, all stripped down. And with that Tom (and, it should be noted, his partner in crime Kathleen Brennan) goes on to provide us with the most death filled and darkest cavalcade of characters in his entire career.
Waits makes his ambitions clear from the first song “The Earth Died Screaming.” From the point of a vengeful god, this is full of biblical images of locusts and hordes of people dying (“Why are they dreaming?”) and the darkest lines for anyone scared of their own mortality: ““Hell doesn’t want you, and heaven is full.” The percussion takes over much of this track, leaving only some semblance of the guitar and an ending for the Chamberlin, so much so that you do kinda wonder why they got bassist extraordinaire and fellow weird person Les Claypool to play. But the other big quality of these tracks, which makes itself very clear in the piano and sax led second track “Dirt in the Ground,” is of course the gruffled one’s voice. Spending lots of time in between his two albums on movie and theatre projects, this album is full of Tom’s voice pushing the theatrical, the bizarre, the off-putting, such as here where he performs in the highest and scratchiest parts of his register.
Next is “Such a Scream,” a shorter number where the man that likes to call himself Brain definitely gets more to do on his instrument than (future) Primus band mate, with bizarre machine-gun-fire drum fills playing alongside sax and guitar as Tom is possessed by Captain Beefheart. But that moves on to what is, likely, the strangest track on here in “All Stripped Down.” A song where guitar sounds like the voices and Tom’s voice goes into such a pitch as to come across feminine, this was a song that I first going to put up the lyrics page up to decipher, but then I decided it was so much better than series of sentences that only occasionally make themselves out to me (what I call deathgripsing). But don’t worry, something makes itself out much more tangible in “Who Are You” a blues rock song full of innuendos that lets the home/circus part of the Tom Waits personality be very prominent (like “mad dog your tilta whirl”/ “Did you bury the carnival/Lions and all”).
“The Ocean Doesn’t Want” does sound like it was literally recorded undersea, with slow, tidal drums and organ(?) and Tom recording his voice on what sounds like an intercom, suicidal with the wish to “stay drowning” in “the endless blue wine,” but larger forces seemingly stop him from doing so. Then we come to a song of almost straight blues in “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” although with one strange guitar sound, that gets close to the tone of a strange pessimist gospel, wherin they wait for Jesus and he certainly doesn’t look like he is arriving. One could even interpret this as a corrupt priest, who preaches Jesus’ return and yet is prone to drink and is just focused on “Fords” as the Lord. The first half of this album concludes with a song that could very easily have been on Rain Dogs, the folk tinged “A Little Rain (for Clyde),” with the aesthetic of his Asylum days and a weird surf-rock style pedal guitar. The lyrics more than showcase Tom’s attraction to the outcast (Where a man with missing fingers/ Plays a strange guitar/ And the German dwarf/ Dances with the buthcer’s son), but the central imagine combined with the ambiguous tale of the 15 year old and the van is particularly moving.
The second half starts with the longest and most industrial song on the track, the oppressive “In the Colosseum,” which in some ways takes the kind of communal/carnival idea that makes many of his songs so appealing and turns them into a nightmare (To the jailer and his men/ It’s always much more sporting/ When there’s families in the pit/ And the madness of the crowd/ Is an epileptic fit). We then have “Going Out West,” a rock song which starts out sounding like a demented Bond theme before those other guitars kick in and make this close to noise rock as Tom Waits asserts a particular kind of macho-masculinity that moves into the mythic. I wish I had more to say about “Going Out West,” as its one of favourites from the album, but I do think its pleasures are more obvious compared to some of the stranger things on this record. “Murder In the Red Barn” returns that mythic quality to this feeling of banjo shaded America. This song has a slow, creeping place enhanced by the creeks of rocking chairs and Tom’s almost childlike sing-songy introduction, before the things that occur in this barn get progressively and vividly darker. “Black Wings” is another blues rock song like “Going Out West” (which might explain why these two are among my favourites on the whole album), although this one has a night-time quality with what sounds like an organ playing in the right ear and too-clean-for-their-own-good notes in the other ear. A story of vengeance that again takes on a biblical quality – and perhaps a Western quality too – Tom’s sing-talking provides perfect narration for this tales of murder and those denying his existence (and, hey, at least he saved a baby from drowning. Good on him!)
“Whistle Down the Wind” is a return, barring the peddle guitar backing, to the grungy piano ballads that would be found on Small Change. Giving these tales of mortality another edge by also giving the angle of mourning the mortal world, this ode to a place where “The dog is tied/ To a wagon of rain/ And the road is as wet as the sea,” though with these surrealist descriptions the truth of this place is definitely more one of self-truth (“And the places that I’m dreaming of/ Do they dream only of me?”). On the opposite end, “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” is a song so punk that the Ramones covered it. This makes sense, since as the title suggests this is a song about maintaining youth (apt for an album so focused on death), and the simple chords really help give this song a propulsion more than most (even if the guitar tones and aggressive way the percussion is played means this still sounds part of the album). And after we get the only instrumental on the album, an outlandish piece called “Let Me Get Up on It” with completely indecipherable vocals that parade into the life of Bone Machine and fade out, the existential dread that the whole album has inhabited is confronted with its climax. “That Feel” as both vague and specific is appropriate a title, as it’s the one I presume that we all feel and yet is specific to all of us. That might explain why this emotional rock climax (helped as always by co-writer and inexplicable mortal being Keith Richards) is ended by a chorus of people; it is by everyone embracing everyone else’s inescapable and creeping “Feel” that is part of the journey of overcoming it in some way. Thus why an album so full of death and bleakness like Bone Machine can be left with a sense of freedom.
Bone Machine is another bizarre, abrasive yet inviting masterpiece from Tom Waits, and catch me on a certain day and I might call it even better than Rain Dogs (I think it is at least a tiny bit more cohesive). It is full of some of both the darkest and harshest material of his career, and yet in turn some of the most emphatic and therapeutic. This is the biggest testament to Tom’s personality, one that five years away doing acting and collaborative work only helped enhance. And the fruits of one of those labours produced another album much sooner than expected.
Tom Waits Album Rankings
- Rain Dogs
- Bone Machine
- Swordfishtrombones
- Heartattack and Vine
- Franks Wild Years
- Small Change
- Blue Valentine
- Closing Time
- Nighthawks at the Diner
- The Heart of Saturday Night
- Foreign Affair