Search - T Bone Burnett :: Tooth of Crime

An Avant Garde Masterpiece

Gord Wilson | Bellingham, WA USA | 12/25/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is the album I think a million alternative bands are trying to make. This is the album Pete Townshend, Maria Muldaur, Patti Smith, and the rest of T-Bone's pals will be listening to, not to mention numerous studio execs. You in?

I read the fifteen page lyric booklet, and the lyrics didn't make any sense. Bill Hart is there thanked for directing the first production of the play. It's a play? This is a soundtrack? Sam Shephard is credited for inventing an "intense nulanguge", and some of it reminds me of his play, True West.



But slip the CD in, and it's a different story. T-Bone's talking blues style perfectly fits the sleek, stylish music, 180 degrees from radio. The album starts off with a noir/ modernist jazz feel on "Anything I Say Can and Will Be Used Against You." There's a dazzling interplay of English major words (and I was an English major), but musically, it's probably T-Bone's best album (and that's saying a lot for a T-Bone fan). Glimpses of startling imagery and snatches of arresting phrases slide through the naked, suggestive music, recalling songs like "Mad Ave" and some of Alpha Band, like "Born in Captivity": "Then when you're the object of complete derision/ I'll make you a star on television."



Sam Phillips provides wonderful vocals on "Dope Island" (and four other songs), reminiscent of her stunning debut, The Indescribable Wow. Roy Orbison is listed as a co-writer on the incredible "Kill Zone". Whatever is going on onstage during the play visually, it must be amazing to hear this audio soundscape performed live. For those new to T-Bone's endless invention, this isn't his most accessible album. Those would include Proof Through the Night, for some reason released only as a limited edition by Rhino on CD, an EP called Trap Door, Truth Decay, and a collection called Twenty-Twenty. But after you hear those (or whatever you can find of those) you'll want more. Take heart, for just when you thought you'd die if they played those same twenty "alternative" songs on the radio again, here's something completely different, and it seems the Muse can sing again.



If this album seems somewhat bleak, it's merely because it is, and whatever else this retro/ future SF/ noir album is, it's an excursion through the dark side of the human condition. Lines like this from "Kill Zone": "How much grief and sin/ til a heart caves in?" simply make you long for the other side of the blues, which T-Bone explores elsewhere, the good news called gospel."