Tom Waits Alice( 180g vinyl remaster 2LP )

Release date: 24-11-2017 (Originally released in 1992)

2017 EU ( 180g vinyl remaster 2LP )

-Alice has been called Waits longlost masterpiece. Originally performed as an opera directed by Robert Wilson for Hamburgs Thalia Theatre in 1992 but left unrecorded until 2001 The show ran for a year and a half using an unusual orchestra designed by Waits to underpin the songs cowritten with his wife Kathleen Brennen Rather than being directly based on Lewis Carrolls Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass the WaitsBrennen Alice takes inspiration from feelings remembered and dreams recalled after reading the books Released simultaneously with Blood Money Sealed in colour sleeve

Tracks: (2LP's)
A1 Alice
A2 Everything You Can Think
A3 Flower's Grave
A4 No One Knows I'm Gone
A5 Kommienezuspadt

B1 Poor Edward
B2 Table Top Joe
B3 Lost In The Harbour
B4 We're All Mad Here
B5 Watch Her Disappear

C1 Reeperbahn
C2 I'm Still Here
C3 Fish & Bird
C4 Barcarolle
C5 Fawn

D Side echted

Its been long time since Tom Waits recorded an album as saturated with tenderness as this one The carnybarker noise merchant who has immersed himself in brokenness and reportage from lifes seamy even hideous underbelly for decades has created along with songwriting and life partner Kathleen Brennan a love song cycle so moving and poetic that its almost unbearable to take in one sitting Alice is alleged to be the great lost Waits masterpiece Waits and Brennan collaborated with Robert Wilson on a stage production loosely based on Alice Liddell the young girl who was the obsession and muse of Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland books The show ran in Europe for a time and the productions 15 songs were left unrecorded until now Alice forgoes the usual nightmare lyric sequences warped circuslike melodies and sonic darknesses that have been part and parcel of Waits work since Swordfishtrombones Instead this song cycle is for the most part steeped in jazz ballads old waltzes European folk songs theatrical love paeans and music not so easily identified The instrumentation is different with the utilization of a small chamber orchestra the violins are Stroh violins instruments outfitted with a metal horn on the end for amplification purposes marimbas piano organ woodwinds and reeds and the complete absence of guitars The set opens with the title track a smoky jazz ballad that may echo Waits work from the 1970s but is actually miles beyond it in scope Here there is no purposely postured nuance or affectation of persona The lyric is plaintive and full of pathos its almost a suicide note set to the most romantic melodic invention lounge jazz is capable of As Waits sings The only strings that hold me here/Are tangled up around the pier/And so a secret kiss/Brings madness with the bliss/And I will think of this/When Im dead and in my grave/Set me adrift/Im lost over there/But I must be insane/To go on skating on your name/And by tracing it twice I fell through the ice/Of Alice/Theres only Alice the world turns inside out and the listener can no longer decide if this is a man or a ghost reporting from beneath the ponds surface If love brings this if obsession has such a cost how can they be steeped in tenderness this transparent and plain Elsewhere Waits manages to delve into the voice of the turnedout lover the rejected stone the lost madman as he does on Were All Mad Here and Everything You Can Think But even here there is a reflective dimension nearly childlike in their simple embrace of loss dispossession and descent into the maelstrom of the human soul Ghosts whisper in the mix spirits float through the air and demons passionately possess the protagonists In the simpler melting melodies of Lost in the Harbour No One Knows Im Gone and the haunting tango at the heart of Watch Her Disappear obsession with the unmentionable let alone the unattainable is offered as an empathy for powerlessness buoyed up by an instrumental crutch arranged to give a voice to those who dare not speak publicly The melodies on Alice are easily the most direct Waits has written since Blue Valentine but are more elegant than even those found on Foreign Affairs or Black Rider Alice is no step back but a further step toward oblivion the place where the sound of desolation the melody of loneliness and the confused darkness at the root of the human heart come together and speak as one in a nursery rhyme for adults AMG

Alice said Waitsis adult songs for children or childrens songs for adults Its a maelstrom or feverdream a tone poem with torch songs and waltzesan odyssey in dream logic and nonsense &nbspis one of the most distinctive of all Waits creations occupying its own corner in the oddangled room that is Tom Waits body of work While there are the familiar partsthe redoubtable ragged voice jazz ballads and poignant musings on death and longingthe whole is strange and exotic

But I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice
Theres only Alice
Alice