CD review: Tom Waits - "Bad as Me"

More than seven years after Real Gone, Tom Waits lands with an album of new songs. And for the first time in his almost four-decade career, it has put him in the American top 10 – at the age of 61, Tom Waits has become mainstream! But that doesn’t keep him, as headstrong as ever, from doing so on his own terms.

Bad as Me combines the two souls that live within him: the jazzy poet of the darkest nightlife who rides on subdued piano ballads, and the demonic screamer who delivers clattering, clinking, clacking rock songs that move like a car with square wheels. This is vintage Waits and one of the best albums of 2011.

(ANTI-Records)

*****