Tom Waits – Rain Dogs

For my tastes this sounds better than the reissue. I feel the new mix has sacrificed brash and bite for clarity.

They’ve re-released the entire Monkees catalogue...isn’t it time for a new vinyl version of Raindogs?

So why is this the most popular Tom Waits album? For starters, it cemented the trajectory of Tom Waits for the next 30 years (and beyond). It established a new way of orchestrating music that made deep call-backs to Wehrmacht Vaudevillian forms that made it immediately interesting while also wholly singular to Tom Waits. It was clearly a popular album and established a style that nobody but Waits could pull off ever. Is there any better example of an artist establishing a "signature sound" than Waits? This album is also best evidence that Tom Waits was the only artist from the early 1970s that actually got better... much, much better... in the 1980s, a decade where all '70s rockers sold their soul for cheesy production tricks and slick, vapid songs. And with all the strangeness - songs like Signapore, Big Black Mariah, Rain Dogs, and Downtown Train - are actually quite poppy, each in their own mutated way. (Hell, Rod Stewart covered Downtown Train, so that goes to show just how strong Waits' songcraft was.) It was an album that could have spawned an entirely new genre of music but ended up only being the domaine of one, and we're all perfectly okay with that. A groundbreaking album that predictably left us all with some turned-up mud in a forgotten field somewhere. And there's a man still dancing in that mud-hole today.