Tom Waits Franks Wild Years by: Kev Lavery Sun:19-Aug-07 Label: Island Year: 1987 WB rating 93 out of 100

Tom Waits’ 11th studio album and second score, Franks Wild Years, is a strange, confusing beast. Painting Waits as a screeching melancholic it moves, very theatrically, through a gauntlet of musical styles. While a dark feeling of distress ties the album together, it jaunts from rhumbas, to cocktail music, to the indescribable noise that has marked Waits’ sound of late. Written for a play of the same name Waits’ newest record sits on the wrong side of purgatory; one foot firmly in hell with the other ready to de-shoe, de-sock and jump in. The result is a frightening score for what must be assumed as a down-right terrifying play – but seductively terrifying. It’s a party ride straight to hell, the music you hear when you imagine skeletons dancing, soloing on one another’s bones.

There is a world of difference between the Waits we see here and the coarse country balladeer, loving and lamenting his way through Closing Time. It’s assumed that after 11 albums and 14 years Waits would evolve, but the breadth of his change is incredible. This development has taken turns through blues, jazz, honky tonk, and country but for the past two albums Waits has delved into unchartered territory. Gone is the status quo of a songwriter and his backing musicians, the conventional instruments are still there, somewhere, but they have been distorted and perverted. Listening comparatively to these two albums the grounding difference is Waits’ voice. Closing Time featured a smooth huskiness in the vocals, a rough tone ironed out with spirits, while Franks Wild Years has Waits washing down a gravel diet with drain cleaner to yelp and scream the turbulence of his venting soul.

Musically, Franks Wild Years is the work of a mad conductor signalling his ragged and unwashed orchestra to wildly abandon convention. Instruments ridiculously named and long disgarded by other musicians are utilised (mellotron, optigon, prepared piano, rooster); love songs are no longer about hitting the road without your baby but rather stoning her to death. The sentiment of Closing Time’s ‘Ol’ 55’ has been replaced with “woe-be-gotten grey skies”, Old Testament forcefulness. 

Album opener ‘Hang On St. Christopher’ lets you know what you are in for from the get go as Waits turns “the mad dog loose”; it’s a stilted and raucous trip in a thundering semi-trailer. Greg Cohen’s horn arrangement is menacing, Mark Ribot sounds like he is playing a guitar made from jangling skeleton bones, and Waits growls a prayer to the adopted patron saint of travellers. ‘Straight To The Top (Rhumba)’ follows with a dark, rolling rhumba, Waits now adopting a song-and- dance man image. Later, reprised as ‘Straight To The Top (Vegas)’ Waits takes this shtick even further, as if morphing into a lounge singer dancing around (and stomping on) the notes that come his way. Ralph Carney’s seductive saxophone and William Schimmel’s “Cocktail Piano” complement and excuse their leader’s deliberate tuning indiscretions.

Franks Wild Years confirms that Waits’ is getting stranger with each progressing album. To counteract this, or possibly because of it, he is surrounding himself with gifted writers and performers while retaining a vice grip on the reigns. Despite his somewhat fractured mental state the characteristically witty lyrics and mangled phrases remain. Waits is, however, going to have to delve deeper into his disturbed unconscious if he is going to top this eccentric concept record and, from the looks of Franks Wild Years, that’d be a hell of a traumatic trip.