ANTI-

Glitter and Doom Live, 2009

Glitter and Doom Live
Available November 23rd, Glitter and Doom is a 2 disc collection of the best of the best tracks from Tom Waits' sold out, highly acclaimed Glitter and Doom tour of the US and Europe in the summer of 2008.

Disc One is designed to sound like one evening's performance, even though the 17 tracks are selected from 10 cities, from Paris to Birmingham; Tulsa to Milan; and Atlanta to Dublin. Sonically the album is superb and has been beautifully recorded and meticulously mastered . Disc Two is a bonus compendium called TOM TALES, which is a selection of the comic bromides, strange musings, and unusual facts that Tom traditionally shares with his audience during the piano set. Waits' topics range from the ritual of insects to the last dying breath of Henry Ford.

Musically, the live disc features all eras of Waits' eclectic glory as he shifts seamlessly from an array of characters: carnival barker, preacher, country singer, soul balladeer; cabaret singer and storyteller. Backed by a versatile 5 piece band, Waits departs from the songs' original incarnations. The songs instrumentation and rhythms are rearranged and reimagined. Swampy tribal rhythms, ominous hymns, gypsy flavored ballads, searing rhythmic r&b, and blues boogies. angular and surreal rock are all present. The songs, as expected ,are about hanged men, woebegone sailors, sword swallowers, fugitives, shamans, ghosts, dance instructors and prison guards.
  • "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."

    Jon Pareles, New York Times
  • 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
  • "Rasp-driven alter-ego come and go, swaddled in delectable cling-clang madness, telling stories born of a barfly/railroder 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
  • "A de facto greatest hits of Waits' fourth decade of music, during which his gnarly adventurousness didn't made but only intensified."

    Pitchfork
  • "One of the greatest performances in Waits' extensive oeuvre."

    Paste
  • "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 CD's 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 ease."

    Spectrum Culture
  • "The more grizzled he gets, the more Tom Waits inhabits his songs, those literate oom-pah stomps through the most decrepit locales and bleak conditions, where humanism barely wrestles down despair."

    Jon Pareles, New York Times
  • "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
  • "On this darkly enchanting concert album, all that glitters isn't doom."

    Lexington Herald-Leader
  • "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 Screm" 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)
  • "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
  • "Tom Waits' live Glitter is pure bliss."

    Knoxville News-Sentinel
  • "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 his 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
  • "This album may make you curse Tom Waits for not touring more...From the sound of Glitter and Doom Live, Waits is as vital onstage as ever, with a band that can play sweet on the ballads and wail like crazy on the rock 'n' roll."

    Tampa Tribune
  • "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