(amazing pic by Villani Marcello)
There’s a new number one album on the college radio charts as Tom Waits’ raucous “Glitter And Doom Live” has climbed two spots to capture the top position. It’s not exactly a new phenomenon for Mister Waits. In the last decade, all but one of his six releases have topped the campus charts giving him a record five number one albums. It started with his Grammy Award-winning “Mule Variations” which held the the top position for seven straight weeks in 1999. Waits’ other top albums include “Blood Money,” “Real Gone” and the triple-album release, “Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards,” which remained at number one for three weeks. Read the full accounting at Chart Attack here. Read More

(Pic by diarmid hurrell)
Tom Waits rollicking concert album “Glitter and Doom Live” is inspiring high praise from music writers across the land, from New York to Lexington to Tampa and the wild plains of the Playboy Mansion. If you haven’t availed yourself of this uniquely entertaining collection of heartfelt ballads and rousing barroom singalongs, then you are depriving yourself of one of life’s few remaining joys.  See below if any doubts remain…
“His band calibrates its rawness, equally capable of a lurching blues and a delicate pizzicato waltz, and his voice is thick and slurred but can always summon tenderness. A second disc is a half-hour montage of stage patter…It’s as surreal as his songs, only funnier.” – New York Times
“The essential contradiction of late-career Waits: He is both an incorrigible dreamer and an inveterate realist…a particularly lively album that is also a persuasive retrospective of Waits’ last 20 years.” – Pitchfork

“Rasp-driven alter-egos come and go, swaddled in delectable cling-clang madness, telling stories born of a barfly/railroader state of mind…If a construction site is your idea of euphony, the jackhammer of a muse, you’ll have plenty to cheer about here.” –The Salt Lake Tribune
“Leave it to Tom Waits to let all the also-rans do their thing before releasing the album of the year as Thanksgiving looms.” –Pop Dose
“Glitter and Doom Live joins Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) and Big Time (1988) as chronicles of the awesome and, across the span of years, protean experience that is Tom Waits live…In the case of most of these tracks, their live rendition is the sum of both gains and losses…songs appear in versions that instantly become definitive.” – Drowned In Sound
“Those lucky enough to see a show on Tom Waits’ 2008 ‘Glitter and Doom’ tour had the chance to see one of the world’s most inspired artists in his element. Waits is not only one of the best songwriters alive, he is one of the most distinctive music artists of the past 100 years. As a singer, Waits is almost frightening. He has the voice of an undead Louis Armstrong crossed with a divinely inspired wino. As off-putting as that might sound, it can be raggedly beautiful.” – Knoxville News-Sentinel
“Even without video accompaniment, Waits’ performance makes a visual impression. It’s easy to imagine him onstage, equal parts carnival barker, barroom poet and street-corner prophet…Glitter and Doom will make you wish Waits would return to the Tampa area. C’mon Tom it’s been 30 years!” –Tampa Tribune
“At the age of 60 Waits has a voice that has grown as rough as a sailor’s beard, with the shadowy rasp of Howlin’ Wolf and Captain Beefheart. The music sounds like tin cans and duck calls or, on the highlights ‘Goin’ Out West’ and ‘Such A Scream,’ like a blues band playing in a pawnshop after closing time. If CDs had odors, this one would smell like an old tow truck.” –Playboy
“Waits is one of our most adventurous musicians and Glitter and Doom Live demonstrates his willingness to push his songs into stranger territory in the live setting…It is really amazing how things can go from sinister to care-free to tender with such deft east.” – Spectrum Culture
“His gruff vocals give new life to tender ballads and increase the scruffy charm of his already-brutish selections…For those who self-identify as Tom Waits fans, Glitter and Doom Live succeeds on pretty much every level…He’s a musical Peter Pan, doing exactly what he wants when he wants, and, damn what anyone thinks, he’ll never grow up.” – Paste
“Tom Waits concerts are real events: phantasmic orgies of twisted, postmodern vaudeville and rag-and-bone blues…the best performances are of tunes that most embrace Waits’ cacophonous side: the barbed-wire rock ‘n’ roll of ‘Such a Scream’ and ‘Metropolitan Glide,’ the bombastic blues of ‘Make it Rain.’” – Creative Loafing
“This superb collection of live tracks is the work of a gyroscope-askew genius piloting his like-minded band into an uncontrolled spiral to the ocean. The stomping, clanging rhythms are a circus from hell. It sounds like some weird ceremony that you’ve stumbled on in the dark woods, and aren’t supposed to see.” –Democrat And Chronicle (Rochester, NY)
“My first impression of Tom Waits’s concert in Atlanta last year was that it could never be captured on disc. Visceral and driving, it was such a feast for the ears and eyes, starting with Waits singing ‘Lucinda’ as he stomped on a box covered in white powder that swirled around him as if he were an apparition straight out of the junkyard. It’s nice to be proved wrong by Glitter and Doom Live…Considering the sweep of Waits’s sound over the years, it’s astonishing how well his band keeps pace with him…if this is as close as you get to hearing Waits live, it’s an illuminating snapshot of an artist whose concerts are increasingly rare and compelling.” – Boston Globe
“This carnival barking crooning carnivore and maestro of the swordfishtrombone avantbossatangowaltz has mastered his particular brand of theater, noise and nuance; its rich despair, its decadent yet romantic espirit, its yawning Brecht-Springsteen-Partchian display; its comic belch…On the jazz-noir ‘Make it Rain,’ the humpback swing ‘Singapore,’ the bleak and beautiful ‘Trampled Rose,’ there’s an effortlessness between Waits and his tight six-piece ensemble that comes from its master’s having lived within the roar for decades. He’s finally tamed the beast.” – Blurt Online
“Waits doesn’t so much perform his material as he inhabits it, resulting in a stream-of-consciousness flow that makes this live record sound like one flawless show even though it was culled from eight concerts in America and Europe.” – Boston Herald
“Most of the songs sound nothing like their original incarnations. Waits and his five-piece band – including woodwinds, harmonica, banjo, mandolin, reed organ, mellotron and clarinet, as well as the traditional drum, guitar, piano and bass – give new life to the arrangements. And then there’s Tom’s vocals. On the bellowing ballads of ‘Fannin Street,’ ‘I’ll Shoot The Moon’ and ‘Lucky Day,’ Waits’ rough edge adds character and darkness to the tales of heartbreak.” – ABC News
“Near the halfway point of Glitter and Doom Live, the third official concert recording from the ever-mercurial Tom Waits (but his first in more than 21 years), a deep, swampy blues called ‘Dirt in the Ground’ is unleashed. Its melody is haunting but warm, its vocal performance frighteningly caustic but immensely human, and its lyrics…well, its lyrics are as simple as life and death…There is nothing quite as affirming as hearing Waits singing like the devil…Such exquisitely scattered storytelling is a major bonus.” – Lexington Herald-Leader Read More

THE BOOK OF ELI: Ohhh Sweet - The top video clips of the week are here
Here’s a hilarious note perfect scene between Tom Waits and Denzel Washington in the new Hughes Brother’s post apocalypse film “The Book of Eli.” Read More

There’s a great review of “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” in the Los Angeles Times. I’m not sure what more you need to know other than it’s directed by Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Brazil) and features Tom Waits as the devil, but if doubt lingers then read the article. The writer Kenneth Turan is by no means a critical pushover so it’s substantial praise. That said, “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” is the third most successful movie this week. But in lieu of another diatribe on the end of civilization, I merely suggest you go see this artistically ambitious and wondrous film.
From The LA Times: “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is as unusual and idiosyncratic as its one-of-a-kind title. You’d expect no less from Terry Gilliam, and admirers of this singular filmmaker will be pleased to know that “Imaginarium” is one of his most original and accessible works. To read the entire review, click here. Read More

(pic fazimel)
Tom Waits plays the devil in the amazingly hallucinatory new Terry Gilliam film “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” which also stars the late Heath Ledger and Johnny Depp. Waits was recently on NPR’s Morning Edition where he spoke with host Steve Inskeep about his role in the movie, working with Gilliam and their oddly shared birthmarks. To read a transcript, listen to, or download the interview, just go here. Read More