Tom Waits is musical institution in America representative of the darker side of entertainment. Waits spiritual roots in pre-rock rock, circus sideshows and vaudeville have been wildly and asymmetrically re-arranged by his own experience with rejection as a man and performer, personal loss and bleak cycles of addiction.The result? Four decades of original, anti-formulaic music covering everything from suicidal traveling troubadours to well meaning, sad-eyed prostitutes. Shocking? Yes. What is more shocking is that this is the environment that surrounds iconoclastic musicians who are not rewarded in the same fashion as pop musicians (Lady Ga Ga, Justin Beiber, etc).
Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years is a Tom Waits compilation album, consisting of previously-released songs from his years recording with Island Records, most notably from the albums Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, Big Time and Franks Wild Years. The tracks were selected by Tom Waits. The album was released in 1998, but represents Waits's output from 1983 to 1993.
Tom Waits - Done In The Hole
References:
- Tom Waits, Official Site
- Wikipedia, Beautiful Maladies
Anton Newcombe is the leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre founded in the early 1990s in San Francisco. The band's name "The Brian Jonestown Massacre" is a mash-up of The Rolling Stones' founder and guitarist Brian Jones and the infamous mass cult suicide in Jonestown, Guyana led by Jim Jones in the late 1970's. Combining the two seemingly similar but polar opposite terms reflects a cruel contradiction in American popular culture.
Death In Vegas, a psychedelic/electronic duo based in the U.K., are a group that broke right before the Millennium in the US. Their success came in the middle of a mostly tired electronic scene that was busy making hyper elevator music and gleefully worshiping acts like Moby. Like disco in the 1970's it was mostly the drugs driving the scene and not the music itself.
Since rebooting with their 7th record simply entitled "the album" in summer of 2009, Wilco has been creating a consistently warm, appealing, crowd-wowing sound from incredibly well-written lyrics and ensemble musical performances. This continues with the group's 8th album, The Whole Love.