Nighthawks At The Diner

しがない人々の心情をユーモアに満ちた暖かい視線で語る、酔いどれの奇才、トム・ウェイツ。彼の初期7作品が新たなリマスター音源となってAnti- Recordsより再リリース決定!こちらはLAにあるRecord Plantスタジオにて観客を前にしてライヴ・レコーディングを行なった、1975年発表の変則的作品『NIGHTHAWKS AT THE DINER』。

Mojo - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[T]his is Waits at his early, freewheeling best, spinning surreal hash-brown picaresques out of marginal bar-room lives."

For his third album, Nighthawks at the Diner, Tom Waits set up a nightclub in the studio, invited an audience, and cut a 70-minute, two-LP set of new songs. It's an appropriate format for compositions that deal even more graphically and, for the first time, humorously with Waits' late-night world of bars and diners. The love lyrics of his debut album had long since given way to a comic lonely-guy stance glimpsed in "Emotional Weather Report" and "Better Off Without a Wife." But what really matters is the elaborate scene-setting of songs like the six-and-a-half-minute "Spare Parts," the seven-and-a-half-minute "Putnam County," and especially the 11-and-a-half-minute "Nighthawk Postcards" that are essentially poetry recitations with jazz backing. Waits is a colorful tour guide of midnight L.A., raving over a swinging rhythm section of Jim Hughart (bass) and Bill Goodwin (drums), with Pete Christlieb wailing away on tenor sax between paragraphs and Mike Melvoin trading off with Waits on piano runs. You could call it overdone, but then, this kind of material made its impact through an accumulation of miscellaneous detail, and who's to say how much is too much? ~ William Ruhlmann|