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Tom Waits Vinyl Records

Swordfishtrombones Vinyl

Name: Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones
Brand: Alliance Entertainment
SKU: 602448898425
Price: 33.99 USD
Availability: InStock

Vinyl 1LP 180g

$33.99

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Professionally packed in vinyl mailers
Authentic & factory sealed
Free replacements for damaged records

Tom Waits tore up his own rulebook with Swordfishtrombones, the 1983 album that turned a piano-bar balladeer into a fearless experimenter, here on 180 gram vinyl.

It was his first record for Island and the first he produced himself, arriving after he left Asylum and began his creative partnership with Kathleen Brennan, who encouraged him toward stranger sounds. Out went the lush strings and the smoky late-night jazz combos. In came marimbas, bagpipes, clanking percussion and a voice that growled, barked and crooned by turns.

"Underground" opens the record with a lurching, subterranean march that announces the new direction in no uncertain terms. "16 Shells from a 30.6" stomps along with junkyard menace, "In the Neighborhood" is a woozy brass-band hymn to ordinary street life, and "Johnsburg, Illinois" is a brief, tender love song named for Brennan's hometown, as sweet as anything Waits has written.

Fifteen short, strange vignettes add up to a world entirely his own, populated by sailors, butchers, drifters and lost souls, all sketched with a novelist's eye for detail.

The album laid the groundwork for Rain Dogs and everything that followed, and it remains the perfect entry point for anyone curious about the wilder side of Waits. It still sounds thrillingly odd today.

UPC:602448898425

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