01	Underground						02:01
	02	Shore Leave						04:18
	03	Dave The Butcher						02:20
	04	Johnsburg, Illinois						01:33
	05	16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six						04:33
	06	Town With No Cheer						04:28
	07	In The Neighborhood						03:07
	08	Just Another Sucker On The Vine						01:46
	09	Frank's Wild Years						01:53
	10	Swordfishtrombone						03:08
	11	Down, Down, Down						02:16
	12	Soldier's Things						03:23
	13	Gin Soaked Boy						02:24
	14	Trouble's Braids						01:18
	15	Rainbirds						03:14

Warner Bros Music Ltd 1983
Swordfishtrombones, 1983
(P) 1983 Island records Inc. 422-842 469-2. All titles Warner Bros. Music Ltd. (P) 1983 Ariola Eurodisc GmbH
c 1983 Jalma Music (ASCAP)
Island 90095. Island ILPS 9762.

Tom Waits: vocals, arranger, writer and producer, chair ("Shore Leave"), Hammond B-3 organ, piano, harmonium, synthesizer, Freedom Bell (all songs written by Tom Waits)
Victor Feldman: bass marimba, marimba, shaker ("Shore Leave"), bass drum with rice ("Shore Leave"), brake drum ("16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six"), bell plate ("16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six"), snare ("16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six"), Hammond B-3 organ, bells, conga, dabuki drum, tambourine, African talking drum
Larry Taylor: acoustic bass, electric bass
Randy Aldcroft: baritone horn, trombone
Stephen Hodges: drums
Fred Tackett: electric guitar, banjo, guitar
Francis Thumm: co-arranger, metal aunglongs ("Shore Leave"), glass harmonica
Chuck Dimonico: bass ("Johnsburg, Illinois")
Joe Romano: trombone ("16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six"), trumpet
Ronnie Barron: Hammond organ ("Frank's Wild Years")
Greg Cohen: bass, acoustic bass
Eric Bikales: organ
Bill Reichenbach: trombone
Dick Hyde: trombone
Anthony Clark Stewart: bag pipes
Carlos Guitarlos: electric guitar
Clark Spangler: synthesizer program
Richard Gibbs: glass harmonica
Stephen Hodges: drums, parade drum, cymbals, parade bass drum, glass harmonica
Kathleen Brennan-Waits: co-producer
Biff Dawes: recording and mixing at Sunset Sound
Tim Boyle: recording ( "Frank's Wild Years")
Peggy McCreary: additional engineering
Richard McKernon: additional engineering
Michael Russ: cover art




SWORDFISHTROMBONES

Year Of Release: 1983
Record rating = 9
Overall rating = 12

In which our hero Tom becomes that great Alternative hero once and for all.
Best song: DOWN DOWN DOWN

Track listing: 1) Underground; 2) Shore Leave; 3) Dave The Butcher; 4) Johnsburg, Illinois; 5) 16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six; 6) Town With No Cheer; 7) In The Neighbourhood; 8) Just Another Sucker On The Vine; 9) Frank's Wild Years; 10) Swordfishtrombone; 11) Down Down Down; 12) Soldier's Things; 13) Gin Soaked Boy; 14) Trouble's Braids; 15) Rainbirds.

And here comes the reinvention that nobody expected, or, at least, nobody could definitely predict. The long gap in between Heartattack And Vine and this one actually finds an easy explanation: Tom spent about a year looking for a record company that would accept this bizarre set of recordings, finally finding such a company in Island Records. No mean feat, either; it was hard enough to convince the record company to issue Tim Buckley's Starsailor in 1970, it was probably thrice as hard to issue Swordfishtrombones in 1983.
So what is the transformation? If you've already heard this and the next several Waits records, you probably know how goddamn hard it is to describe Tom's style at this point. Okay, so let's have a go anyway - perhaps the principal change is in the instrumental side of things. On previous records, Tom was usually either accompanied by a regular, normal-sounding small jazz or rock backing band, or by an entire "strings department" on his more Hollywood-ish numbers. Here, he mostly dismisses both styles; his backing band is now firmly rooted in avantgarde jazz, with prominent percussion, bass and dissonant horn sections, a minimum of (usually freaky and feedbackish) guitars, and occasionally some goofy keyboards playing against the rhythm section, if possible. Little signs of this approach were already visible on the last album, but it's on here that the music really goes off the deep end.
Vocally, then, Tom undergoes a metamorphose, too - way too often, he simply refuses to sing, groaning and grunting and howling instead, or, more usually, just ranting and raving like he already did previously in his 'Diamonds On My Windshield' style compositions. Even the few "ballads" on the album sound more like insane, stream-of-consciousness-style blubberings. And lyrically, Tom's all over the place too, with some of his usual personage impersonations mixed with shocking life-story narratives and pictures of life in all kinds of places all over the planet, but usually the ones having something to do with dirt, damp, and decay. What, you were expecting Mr Waits to start singing praise to the glories of Paradise or something?
And thus, the arrogant, bold musical structures, combined with Tom's brashness, harshness and - usually - perfect self-control despite all the insane trimmings, makes up for a really haunting listening experience, except that this time around you really need the lyrics sheet lying somewhere around. It's not perfect, I must say - stuff like these short instrumentals strewn around ('Just Another Sucker On The Vine', etc.) don't exactly do much for me, because, frankly, this kind of music is worthless without Tom adding his vocals, and I must seriously stress this point: you won't often find me praising a particularly cool bassline from Greg Cohen or an intricate guitar line from Fred Tackett or whatever. But when taken together, the vocals and the instrumentation mesh in a perfect mix.
I'll move around now and try to tackle just a few highlights to try and give you a general feeling of this stuff (which reminds me - from now on, Tom's compositions are, for the most part, deliberately short and concise, which also means that he can squeeze quite a lot of 'em onto an album and makes the process of reviewing really screwy if you go and describe all of them). 'Underground' kicks the album off with an excellent representative of the new style - no prisoners taken! - a mostly percussion-based, weirdly catchy song about those who live under our feet (diggers? miners? who cares? dirt and damp and decay, remember!). 'Shore Leave' is a song about shore leave... song? Rather a bloody nightmare, with echoey chimes and squeaky chunks of guitar feedback accompanying Tom as he tells this here story about being so far from home. Some would mold these lyrics into a sappy ballad, Tom molds these into a paranoid monster of a tune.
'16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six' is about a sheriff, I guess, and his hunt after a criminal? Cute drum pattern accompanying Tom's roarings on here, providing a really desperate mood. 'In The Neighbourhood' is a breather of sorts, a rather "conventional" ballad with martial drum rhythms and a dirgey brass backing and a lyrical subject of, well, just another day in the neighbourhood, and it wouldn't sound out of place on Blue Valentine. 'Frank's Wild Years', which later served as the starting point for a whole show and album, isn't even a song, just a little one-and-a-half minute narrative about the ordinary average guy with an ordinary average life who ended up putting his house (and family?) to fire and heading North to start a new life. Nothing extraordinary.
'Down Down Down' is my current favourite on the record, mainly because it's the only "fast" song on here, so sue me, cuz it's also rather conventional, but it also has a great fast organ solo and the appropriate Tom Waits lyrics about selling your soul - if you go 'down down down', you know where you are going. Yeah, so I'm a sucker for Tom's take on fast cabaret-style entertainment, well it's not like I get this kind of songs every day. Moving on, we also have 'Soldier's Things', with perhaps the most nostalgic and heart-breaking lyrics (backed with an appropriate piano melody) on the record, and the hard-rocking 'Gin Soaked Boy', inherited directly from 'Heartattack And Vine' (the song), the percussion freakout 'Trouble Braids', and the atmospheric instrumental piano closer 'Rainbirds'.
I haven't described every song, but there's no need to - suffice it to say that this was a thoroughly revolutionary record; nobody had done such a weird mix of street life poetry and intelligent avantgarde freaky instrumental stuff up to that time, and at an epoch when Dylan, Springsteen, and the rest of them were happily 'selling out' to their producers and allowing their lyrics and melodies to be placed in harmless slick Eighties' arrangements shells, Waits managed to totally defy convention by marrying his "street songwriter" image to the kind of music that only the most snub-nosed audiences were able to (or were thought to be able to) appreciate. Actually, Swordfishtrombones doesn't sound half as "inaccessible" as it's usually depicted once you've sat through it with will and understanding at least one time; but I guess that's really a good thing. Isn't it?