Rain Dogs

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
The middle album of the trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years, Rain Dogs is Waits's best overall effort. The songs are first-rate, and there are a lot of them--19 in all, ranging from grim nightlife memoirs ("9th and Hennepin," "Singapore") to portraits of small-time hustlers ("Gun Street Girl", "Union Square") to bursts of street- corner philosophy ("Blind Love", "Time"). The album also contains the original version of "Downtown Train", which Rod Stewart turned into a smash hit. The image of "rain dogs"--animals who've lost their way home because the rain has washed away their scent--is an appropriate symbol for the entire cast of characters Waits has brought to life over the years, and this album has thus far proved to be his most enduring effort. --Daniel Durchholz

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Description
Tom Waits discarded his bohemian sage persona with the radical Swordfishtrombones, and this follow-up release synthesized and developed themes from that groundbreaking album. Ever-shifting percussive textures are supported, where applicable, by horns or Farfisa organ and several guest musicians, including Rolling Stone Keith Richards, contribute to its melange. Waits' bourbon-laced voice is as riveting as ever, intoning lyrics that are, at various times, touching, evocative,sly or simply funny. His off-kilter perceptions encompass country, polkas and heart-rending ballads, each of which he expresses with consummate ease. Rain Dogs is yet another strong statement from a highly innovative artist.

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Customer reviews

review by: Psyco date: 2008-06-25 rating:
Hang down your head
What an album! I have never known two songs hang down your head and time to make me cry! They are two af my fave songs EVER! But the whole album just oozes by wonderfuly! Tom is an amazing geezer and this album rocks from start to finish! BUY IT!!

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review by: gaskella2 date: 2008-04-11 rating:
A brilliant mid-career set - My favourite Waits album
Tom Waits is one of music's best-kept secrets. You may not know his name, but you'll know his songs - Rod Stewart's cover of 'Downtown Train' or Springsteen's 'Jersey Girl' for instance. He's a outstanding songwriter with a unique selling point ... his voice. To describe it as a bourbon-soaked, gravelly barroom growl would be to do him a disservice as it's far more than that. It's another musical instrument, but one deriving from the theatre or circus, not from any conventional orchestra.

Rain Dogs, the sequel to Swordfishtrombones (vols I & II of a mid-career trilogy of albums for Island records), was released in 1985. There is not a single dud track from the first 'Singapore' and the anticipation of a journey just beginning, right to the end and the world-weary 'Anywhere I lay my head'. As usual we meet a motley groups of Waitsian characters from Uncle Vernon in the percussive 'Cemetery Polka' to Brooklyn girls in the sublime aforementioned 'Downtown Train'. We meet the guys 'Walking Spanish' - prisoners walking down death row and see the seedy side of life on '9th & Hennepin'. My personal favourites are 'Jockey full of bourbon' and the title track 'Rain Dogs', both of which are about booze and carousing, and although they're not lullabies are strangely soothing musically. Several tracks are boosted by the appearance of Keith Richards too. This character fuelled album is upbeat and uplifting and totally addictive.

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review by: chinaboatman date: 2007-07-12 rating:
For I am a Rain Dog Too
Wait's most pop oriented (in the sense of short songs and catchy, easy to listen to tunes) lp and many people's favourite. A dizzyingly diverse series of vignettes in a range of Waits styles past and present ('Walking Spanish' looks back; 'Singapore' looks forward). A little of everything here, this album is almost like a commercial for Wait's career. Also perhaps his most varied album vocally, from whispered hush to his full scale `pirate' boom.
Very upbeat, with little in the way of the slow ballads that had been his staple before this(though that doesn't mean there are no lumps in the throat: there are), there is an immediacy here that will rattle you through the 19 tracks before you can catch your breath.

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review by: date: 2007-04-20 rating:
1st and still best
This was the very first CD I ever bought - a random choice after hearing his music used in a contemporary dance show. It thrilled me then and it thrills me now. Unquestionably deserves it's place in the best albums ever line up.


review by: date: 2007-03-18 rating:
Probably the greatest album ever
Tom Waits' Rain Dogs is a unique and innovative masterpiece. A marvellous mixture of blues, jazz, county and rock, all served up with bags of gravel, guts and soul. If you're used to mainstream rock/pop then this album will sound like nothing you've ever heard before. There are songs on this album that make you wonder how anyone could make something so strange sound so sweet. Songs like "Cemetery Polka", which has some of the nuttiest melodies you could ever hope to hear outside of a Frank Zappa album, and yet it works so wonderfully. "Tango Till They're Sore" begins with piano chords that sound slightly drunken, but you keep listening, and you're rewarded with a wonderfully honest and soulful song.

The lyrics throughout the entire album are full of dark poetry and dusty, gritty, broken glass imagery. "Let narrow bone and cleaver chose while making feet for children's shoes", "Uncle Phil can't live without his pills, he has emphysema and he's almost blind, and we must find out where the money is, get it now before he loses his mind", "She has that razor sadness that only gets worse with the clang and the thunder of the southern pacific going by. And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet, till you're full of rag water, bitters and blue ruin, and you spill out over the side to anyone who'll listen". This, together with Tom's magnificently scratchy gutbucket vocals, makes for a ball-grabbing musical experience - and if music doesn't grab you by the balls, it ain't doing it's job right?

This is a most extraordinary album, it's musically challenging, and yet you can sing along to it in the shower, which was a new one one me. Normally if I like an album straight away I get bored with it after a couple of months and never want to hear it again - instantly likable, soon forgotten. Rain Dogs is the exception that proves the rule. I loved it when I first heard it, and I'm still enjoying it years later. "Taxi? We'd rather walk, huddle a doorway with the Rain Dogs, for I am a Rain Dog too". BUY IT!

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