Recommendations of the Editorial team
Two years before the publication of “Rain Dogs”, Tom Waits had said goodbye to his troubadour and bar singer image with the album “Swordfishstrombones”-no, he had destroyed it, with an eccentric plate full of blues abstractions and the scratchy voice that became his trademark.
“Rain Dogs” is a little more accessible, but the basic colors are the same. Marc Ribot plays crooked tones, the Marimba clamps, the songs fluctuate. Keith Richards adds rhythm & blues.
The opener, “Singapore”, is already fabulous, a sparkling polka in which sailors go to a strange country on an ominous sea voyage. They are abandoned by all good spirits.
Tom Waits and the 80s
“Rain Dogs” is a record of the eighties and yet not because Waits had said goodbye. The blues, the tango, the fair music and the freakshow refer to Captain BeefheartHarry Partch and Kurt Weills Aesthetics of the 20s and early 1930s. Waits’ songs are surrealism and grotesque: you can no longer see it to see it again.
“Rain Dogs” is Waits’ the best known album to this day because the spitting and gossenspoetic is downside, but not too off – the drunk types in “Tango Till They’re Sore” carry many in their souls. But much more important: Tom Waits is an infinite romantic, a big heart beats under this music.
Of course in “Downtown Train”, which finally made Rod Stewart famous. But especially with “Time”, a heartbreaker of a song that deals with dying and again about sailors and the memory that disappears like a train on the horizon. The ear for everyday talks, the associative, the sympathy: Waits unfolds with his poem on “Rain Dogs” an impressionist magic that hardly reaches another songwriter.
“Rain Dogs” is an ode to the small-town Napoleons, the failed and homeless, and Tom Waits sings as croaky blues. It is the most beautiful tragedy in the world.