McCartney almost single-handedly stinks up the whole batch. If only Tom Waits had been given a seat and a microphone beside all those painkiller-and-vitamin-goofy ex-jock anchors at the Super Bowl halftime show, Waits could have responded to McCartney's "Wouldn't it be great if, in these patriotic times, the Patriots won?" blather by howling-- as he does on one of his two new albums-- "Who gives a good goddamn?!" In fact, Waits' new platters offer three rejoinders to "Freedom," McCartney's banal attempt at a post-millennial moment-defining anthem: "Misery Is the River of the World," "Everything Goes to Hell," and "We're All Mad Here."

Tom Waits has been milking the concept of the ramshackle apocalyptic carnival for twenty years now, flaunting a keen otherworldly nostalgia and a preoccupation with freaks that transcends the hell out of Harmony Korine's. In the 80s-- when everything was measured in 'oodles' and forecasts didn't include a 30% chance of terrorism-- Waits rescued himself from his role as a clever lounge slouch by going real weird right about the time he hitched himself to Kathleen Brennan, whose influence has grown with each release (she co-wrote and co-produced both new albums). Back then, fans of the old Waits cried "Yoko!" but let's face it: that barroom-sage thing was getting pretty half-hearted. It's difficult not to hear the new song "Coney Island Baby" as an ode to Brennan, the psycho-circus muse: "Every night she comes/ To take me out to Dreamland."

Both of Waits' new discs are their own concept albums, and both are collections of sick Germanic showtunes resulting from overseas theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson (the man infamous for staging Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach, and with whom Waits made The Black Rider). Both albums' subjects are headline-fodder: Alice deals with (ahem) (cough) intergenerational desire (reportedly based on Lewis Carroll and the famous little girl whose hand he would squeeze during their walks), while Blood Money (written to accompany the play Woycek) hazards the realm of psychopharmacology via its tale of old-world medical mind-tampering. Waits makes his woebegone statements about the muck of modern life artfully and metaphorically, avoiding the overt outrage that leisure-class sophistos would label tedious.

These albums function in Waits' discography the way the film The Man Who Wasn't There fits into the Coen oeuvre: they are self-homages, full of superceding revisitations, that hone rather than advance. The exotica of Swordfishtrombones, the arch storytelling of Rain Dogs, and the better elements of the hit-and-miss Mule Variations are fully realized here, sustained for 91 cohesively transportative minutes of convoluted waltzes and marches. At one point, Waits even plinks the piano bit from "Innocent When You Dream" with a winking brio that whispers, "Ain't I fun?" Blood Money's clomp-and-stomp and Alice's musty ether represent the osteoporosis of Bone Machine and the senile dementia of The Black Rider, allowed to blossom into terminal malaise.

Both albums are further testament that Waits' inner cryptkeeper is getting sharper, combining disparate instruments with calamitous precision and conjuring worlds in which celebrities are born without bodies and razors 'find' throats. The music is so expressive and confident in its spook-ass vibe that it's flat-out cinematic. The instrumentals serve as aural Rorsharchs (the gorgeous violin of "Fawn" made me see bugs mating-- now you try!) and Waits' voice is warmly recorded on each of the pump-organ-and-stand-up-bass dirges, some of which seem to channel the balcony-leaping spirit of a heroin-shriveled Chet Baker.

The guitar of "Starving in the Belly of a Whale" sounds like an animatronic parasite prancing on your spine. "Lost in the Harbour" captures the creaky havoc of metal bending to the sea. "Lullaby" is a perfect nugget of twilight insecurity, and the nightmare cartoon of "Kommienezuspadt" begs for a club mix. Every syllable of "God's Away on Business" is a seizure, with the Ben-Hur slaveship-rowing coach pumping the tempo to ramming speed. Those of you who first heard Tom Waits, as I did-- that is, over lasagna at the house of a junior-high teacher with a skin disease who was trying to seduce you-- will relish the albums' creepy love songs. They shine a morbid light on how most love-pop reduces the world to a consuming need for one magical person, and how often it's a bum swap: the Alice of Alice brings its protagonist an ounce of redemption and a ton of ruin.

Okay, so you might find the voices silly (there's Ancient-Mariner-on-a-bender, post-pubescent Grover, Golem-in-a-tux, and Gungan Boss Hogg). Okay, so this is the first group of Waits songs where the ingredients seem so familiar that listeners feel empowered enough to try to guess the recipe and write their very own Tom Waits Song (I'm talking to you, Joe Henry). Okay, so a moratorium should be imposed on the kiss/bliss rhyme. Okay, so some of the recombinatory stunts of The Man Who Wasn't There felt autopiloted and didn't satisfy as much as the first time you encountered them. Okay, so Anti's copy editor should have to rescue rabbits from cosmetics testing labs to atone for how badly they transcribed and jumbled the lyrics in the booklet. (What gives? I bet Epitaph has a brigade of undergrad interns that sort out each apostrophe in Bad Religion liner notes.)

Still, you should be ashamed you bought that Cursive, or Pedro the Lion, or Ladytron CD, and get these. Synth-pooh and guitar-flarney doesn't have jack on calliopes, marimbas, chamberlains, cellos, and tubas, all of it in classily surreal packaging that screams "Fuck the Grammys." While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. Something wicked this way hams, and it ain't afraid to be misanthropic and admit that humans are just monkeys trained to parallel park. Come on, you Disney puds, it's time to let Waits and David Lynch do Kafka's Metamorphosis as a musical.

-William Bowers, May 14th, 2002