Bone Machine

Album: Bone Machine

Artist: Tom Waits

Released: September 8th, 1992

Highlights: Dirt in the Ground, Who Are You, Black Wings, That Feel

In “Swordfishtrombones”, Tom Waits transitioned from a mysterious young man who sat at the piano of a bar to touch his audience’s hearts with gorgeous lyrics and inspired melodies to a clinically insane bum who built a band with instruments found at the closest junkyard. It was a shift that breathed new life into a career that had grown somewhat stagnant while also paving the way towards some of the weirdest and wildest experimentation in the history of Western music. Coming almost one decade after “Swordfishtrombones”, and with two fantastic and odd albums separating them, “Bone Machine” does not abandon the image associated with its predecessors: it is still, in essence, music that sounds as if it were made by throwing a lot of disjointed pieces together in the midst of a mad stupor. With it, however, Waits moved his act from the filthy junkyard to the gates of hell.

That is to say “Bone Machine” is one dark record. It shuns the humor, carnival spirit, and drunk sadness of the trilogy that preceded it and it chooses to explore, in lyrics and music, subjects that are nothing short of depressive. There is horrifying apocalypse (“Earth Died Screaming”), the meaninglessness of life (“Dirt in the Ground”), resentment towards a lover who takes pleasure in breaking hearts (“Who Are You”), suicide (“The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”), social degradation into brutality (“In the Colosseum”), the atmosphere surrounding a mysterious assassination (“Murder in the Red Bar”), the devil himself – possibly – expressing a sinister kind of pleasure upon witnessing the destruction of the moral fabric that holds humanity together (“Black Wings”), and the attempt to hide the pain one feels when leaving the sometimes deadly comfort of familiarity (“Whistle Down The Wind”).

The greatness of “Bone Machine”, though, is not just in how Tom Waits approaches these matters with lyrics that are nothing short of spectacular; after all, that is par for the course for an artist as gifted as he is. “Bone Machine” augments its darkness by sounding not like a funeral where everyone weeps for the misery of life, but by coming off as some twisted celebration of death and destruction. Stripped from the complex instrumentation that was born in “Swordfishtrombones”, the songs here sound almost primal: percussion, invariably, serves as the guiding thread that unites them all; and over these wicked drums Waits and his band deliver melodies, piano arrangements, and guitar lines that drink heavily from the saddest blues numbers, as if they were conducting a frantic séance that summoned the spirit of Robert Johnson himself. Like a twisted maniac, Waits is clearly having a blast in dissecting our tortured existence, turning “Bone Machine” into an album that basks under the life-sucking vortex of a gigantic black hole.

Thanks to such consistency in mood and a powerful display of songwriting, “Bone Machine” easily qualifies as Tom Waits’ most solid work. Its ups do not go as high as those of “Rain Dogs”, but it is steadily reaching high marks throughout its running time. Instead of sulking when faced with the horrors of living, Tom Waits opts to stare down whoever is throwing this amount of trash at us, bang on a drum as maniacally as possible, and prove that he is loving the act of swimming through all the sewage. When listening to “Bone Machine”, one cannot help but smile towards old, crazy, and wise Tom, and join him in making some noise inside a basement directly connected to the furnaces of Satan. The alternative, after all, is sinking to the bottom of a garbage-ridden river.