Tom Waits's most recent albums have been all muscle, bone, and viscera -- and often exposed. His 1999 Mule Variations (Anti-/Epitaph) was full of stories that dripped sweat and shambled along on broken-backed rhythms, blending flat-out skronk with Mississippi Delta grit and religious fervor. Bone Machine (Island), which came seven years before, was even tougher. Its lyrics favored rural settings for their lamplight burials and backwoods killings, but the disc had a distinctly urban industrial crunch. Waits's raw howling and dense orchestrations were the sound of the demon machinery of progress devouring human souls, foible by delicious foible.

That didn't stop Mule Variations from selling more than a million copies, or Bone Machine from winning a Grammy. Which means that life as the Fellini character that Waits -- with his sooty, rumpled jackets and antique demeanor -- has made of himself is good. Perhaps that's a reason why Alice (Anti-/Epitaph), one of the two new CDs he issued last week, is so beautiful. Of course it's dark and tormented, but at times it's also as touching as his sweetest and most melodic work, conventional ballads like the gently hopeful "Ol' 55" from his 1973 debut, Closing Time (Island), or the sad-eyed "Tom Traubert's Blues" from '76's Small Change (Island).

Alice's thorns are not just in the skittering collection of violins and cellos that sing like chalk on a blackboard in "We're All Mad Here" and flit like brightly colored insects through the entire album. The sharpest barb protrudes from its heart. These odd-but-affecting lyrics about love, loss, and longing were inspired by Lewis Carroll's pedophilic obsession with Alice Liddell, the girl for whom he wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Nonetheless, the feelings these songs express are deep and touching. Waits's Tin Pan Alley brilliance makes numbers like the unrequited love story "Fish & Bird" soft-centered tearjerkers, even when you know that the star-crossed creatures of its title are metaphoric stand-ins for Carroll and Liddell.

From its opening portrait of obsession -- caressed by brushstrokes of gentle saxophone and muted trumpet, and by Waits's raspy whispered singing -- to the final "Fawn," a ballet for a Stroh violin whose high, sweet-but-cracking tone sums up all the elements of beauty and creepiness that breathe through the details of Carroll's fixation like mist, Alice is Waits's most sensitive and fine-tuned work since 1985's Rain Dogs. Blood Money (Anti-/Epitaph) is a different kind of beast. "If there's one thing you can say about mankind/There's nothing kind about man," Waits grumbles in "Misery Is the River of the World" as marimba and calliope collide over what sounds like the crack of marching jackboots. That's how the album begins, serving notice of just where its baker's dozen songs are headed. Blood Money is full of croaking odes to mammon, thoroughly stocked in lies, lust, and murder. And Waits waves the color red as if we were bulls, inciting us with visions of crimson moons, roses, and blood in order to keep a sense of constant, subdued threat on tap as the album winds its crooked path. It's even that way in the love song "Coney Island Baby," whose heroine is both "a princess in a red dress" and "a rose." Either way, she's dethroned or uprooted by the time the jazzier, more angular arrangements of this album close their case with the drunken parlor music of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," a gnarled lament for lost innocence.

What Alice and Blood Money have in common -- besides Waits's Caligari-like vision of the crazy-angular world he and his long-time collaborator and wife, Kathleen Brennan, create with these songs -- are their origins. Both began as theatrical collaborations with the adventurous director and conceptualist Robert Wilson. Alice was first staged as an avant-garde opera based on Carroll's unsettling desire for Liddell by Hamburg's Thalia Theater in 1992. It ran for 18 months, with a small orchestra assembled by Waits. Blood Money is Wilson's take on German poet Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, a play inspired by the true story of a German soldier driven to madness and murder by army medical experiments and infidelity. It premiered at Copenhagen's Betty Nansen Theater in November 2000.

Waits also collaborated with Wilson and beat novelist William Burroughs for 1993's The Black Rider, an adaptation of a dark German folk tale that likewise premiered at Thalia. He recorded an album of The Black Rider while it was fresh, and the songs of Blood Money are barely two years old. It's a mystery why he waited so long to commit Alice to tape when you consider how effectively he captures the isolation, imbalance, and melancholy that Carroll must have felt. Or perhaps that gave him pause. It's tricky, prickly subject matter, though Waits and Brennan have transformed it by telling the tale with flowers, animals, circus folk, and seawater. He's also softened it with his unconventionally employed string section (which includes the bright, honeyed notes of the tin-horn-bearing Stroh), pump organ, and delicate reeds and horns.

Blood Money offers little of that subtlety, attaching its brash passages of violence and insanity to a mostly molten core of sound. A calliope toots nuthouse melodies, bongos whack beats from the Devil's coffeehouse, and Waits puffs his voice up in hoarse impersonations of cynicism and ugliness. Horns dominate most of the arrangements. It's like Alice's more conventionally evil twin.

Waits has been especially adept at producing the whiff of malevolence since he broke with his early career in 1983. That year he made Swordfishtrombones, burying the hatchet squarely in the skull of the gin-soaked troubadour persona he'd minted from the mineral inspiration of the hipster poet Lord Buckley and the classic American songman Hoagy Carmichael. The beautiful losers of earlier character studies like "Burma Shave" and the patter of beatnik soliloquies like "Diamonds on My Windshield" -- which thrived on a collection of signatures that included cool Chet Baker-style horns, traditional strings, and walking bass -- disappeared. Instead there was the shambling clatter of "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six," which replaced his frayed croon with hoarse shotgun-blast vocals and tales about ex-cons and the Devil, who has since been a frequent guest in Waits's repertoire. He kept stretching and all of this became polished into a template with Rain Dogs. That album balanced the beauty and roar of his new style on a scale that gave equal weight to just about every form of American and European song, from country ballads to polka and waltzes. And so it's gone for Waits ever since, with deeper nods toward various idioms from album to album as his interests or writing begged.

Humor has also gone a long way to keep Waits's offerings vibrant. It's in his orchestrations, like the daftly quacking bass clarinet in Blood Money's "Starving in the Belly of a Whale," where blues-harmonica master Charlie Musselwhite blows a simpático duet with Waits's voice. Or the lopsided orbit of the melodies that he weaves together on calliope, toy piano, and trumpet in the instrumental "Calliope," which he crowns with a delighted cackle. But he's funniest when he takes his lyrics over the top. "I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby/For a buck, for a buck," he croaks in "God's Away on Business," the mid-album fulcrum on which, I presume, poor Woyzeck's sanity begins to tip. He continues: "Digging up the dead with a shovel and a pick/It's a job, it's a job/Bloody moon rising with a plague and a flood/Join the mob, join the mob." It's a parody of meanness, our corporate-driven mentality, and even Waits himself all at once.

It's not easy to figure out where Waits's albums sit on the yardstick of popular culture. Few other musicians and songwriters have used pop culture's stones and bearskins to build their own universe as effectively as he and Brennan have. Pere Ubu's David Thomas and also Captain Beefheart, who turned in his baton for a paintbrush in 1986, come to mind, but they never penetrated the mainstream as deeply as Waits. Even by his own singular standards, Alice and Blood Money are fine, fully realized works. Alice is a strong contender for a slot among this year's finest CDs. It's more precious, perhaps, because its lovely architecture is set on such improbably shaky ground. And yet Waits, perhaps exercising a bit of the carny huckster that's also part of his rumpled persona, keeps convincing you with his and Brennan's songs that there's a sad, inner beauty even within Carroll's awful love. Your reaction is apt to be as unexpected as the laughter that erupts in movie theaters when John Travolta's hit man accidentally blows the head off his hapless informant in Pulp Fiction. You might feel a little guilty, but you've been undeniably touched.

Issue Date: May 17 - 23, 2002