release date: May 4, 2002
format: cd (6632-2)
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,48]
producer: Kathleen Brennan, Tom Waits
label: ANTI- - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 1. "Alice" - 5. "Kommienezuspadt" - 7. "Table Top Joe" - 11. "Reeperbahn" - 12. "I'm Still Here" - 13. "Fish & Bird"
15th studio album by Tom Waits following three years after the acclaimed Mule Variations (1999) is released simultaneously with the album Blood Money, which contains music by Waits to the play "Woyzech" by Georg Büchner in a theatrical adaptation directed by Robert Wilson, which premiered at Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen, Nov. 2000. In this regard, Alice is not just one of Waits' more regular studio releases - as I initially thought of it. The 2002 album Alice is actually Waits' new recordings to his own music written and composed for the the play 1992 play "Alice", which he also made with Robert Wilson. Both albums have lyrics and music by Kathleen Brennan and Waits and they are both released on ANTI-. And as has become a bit of a habit, the couple, Waits and Brennan, also co-produced the album together.
The album follows closely in the same style as Mule Variations and like that has a bit of a return feel picking up some of his more laid-back albums with focus on vocal jazz as contrary to his more noisy albums of the '90s. The title track is a mighty fine and mellow tune, and the album's best song, although, it really sounds a lot like "Soldier's Things" from Swordfishtrombones (1983). And that's really also the album's most evident weakness - that it sounds much like a mix of what we've heard before from '83 and up until '99, and in that sense Waits doesn't deliver what he always sat out to do: to never repeat himself.
Compared to Blood Money the album contains songs in a gentler ballad-like style, which could be refered to as a more feminine tone.
[ allmusic.com, Q Magazine, Rolling Stone, NME 4 / 5, Spin 3,5 / 5 stars ]
