Tom Waits – Rain Dogs (Half Speed Master) 2LP

Noted as Tom Waits’ most critically acclaimed album, ‘Rain Dogs’ follows the new musical path Waits had taken with ‘Swordfishtrombones’. Considered the middle of a de facto trilogy with ‘Swordfishtrombones’ and ‘Franks Wild Years’, ‘Rain Dogs’ is the first of Waits’ albums to be written in New York, in a Lower Manhattan basement. A 53-minute, 19-track monster album is a kind of mutant, late 20th century musical ‘Canterbury Tales’ with a shape-shifting band. There are banjos and marimbas and bowed saw and parade drum and howling horns (and Keith Richards and Marc Ribot) on this rollicking, rough-hewn opus – and Waits, using his voice in increasingly weird-and-wild ways. The songs are stories, sagas, laments, breakdowns, character studies, comedies and cabaret numbers.