Tom Waits

Though Waits made six LPs with Island -- from '83's Swordfishtrombones to '93's The Black Rider -- most of this compilation is from early in the relationship. For as great as his early '80s work was, Beautiful Maladies is stuck in an odd impasse: too disjointed for the uninitiated, yet too incomplete for fans of the original LPs. Reminders of Waits' strengths as a songwriter are here in spades, but the fact that those songs sound so orphaned when taken from their original context is a more potent testament to his conceptual strength as an album artist.

Whereas my favorite moments on Waits's many inconsistent albums--the pop parody-throwaway "I'll Shoot the Moon," the rawly elegant "All Stripped Down"--avoid the American grotesquerie he's overrated for, these 23 self-selections do not. As your designated bean counter I note that 10 of them come from Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs, which hold up as totalities. Yet even when I program around those 10, this also holds up as a totality, persuading me that the main reason Waits is overrated is that he's never given up on himself. Over more years than most reprobates have in them he's covered more ground than most boho-lowlife shtick has room for--in a cockeyed, wildly varied body of songs that find form in a music nobody dares call lounge-rock because Kurt Weill and Leadbelly will come back and feed them to the fishes if they do. This is a sound with no interest whatsoever in glamour, even as something to make fun of. When it meshes, who can niggle about the literary and vocal affectations of such a hell of a bandleader? (Grade: A-)