This came out in 2004 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Human beatboxing? Turntable scratching? No piano whatsoever? This is a Tom Waits album? Oh, you better believe it is, mac. And it’s a monster to boot.
The aptly titled Real Gone, Waits’ first disc of all-new material in five years, documents the latest sonic evolution from one of the most individual and idiosyncratic adventurers in music. This time, the locomotive-breathed singer-songwriter’s wanderlust has led him to — believe it or not — hip-hop. Or, to be more precise, to a couple of its trademark tools and trappings, which Waits co-opts and converts for his own nefarious purposes.
Instead of the lumpy, clattering drums we expect, Tom uses his ample lungpower to provide his own backbeats for many of these 16 tracks, grunting and groaning and barking and moaning beneath the band like the long-lost love child of Captain Beefheart and Rahzel. In another nod to urban music, one cut features wicky-wicky turntables. (Fans needn’t fear, however — Waits stops short of actual rapping.)
Despite his latest musical magpie act, Waits is still rooting around in the same dusty, jumbled attic he’s inhabited for 20 years. And like every album since Swordfishtrombones, Real Gone is another home-built thingamajig of rusted car parts, broken dreams and old bones, stitched together with cobwebs and smoke, lovingly frosted with heartache. You’ve got the grim-reaper blues tracks, complete with snakefinger noir guitars and no-fi primitivism. You’ve got the grand-weeper Tin Pan Alley ballads, with their frank yearning and unvarnished elegance. Together, they form a savagely beautiful setting for Waits’ thunderous rumblings and grumblings about carnies and gamblers, night clerks and soldiers, lipstick traces and the one that got away. Don’t let that happen to this one.
