Tom Waits | Press

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"His gruff vocals give new life to tender ballads and increase the scruffy charm of his already-brutish selections...For those who self-identify as Tom Waits fans, Glitter and Doom Live succeeds on pretty much every level...He's a musical Peter Pan, doing exactly what he wants when he wants, and, damn what anyone thinks, he'll never grow up."

- Paste

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"The more grizzled he gets, the more Tom Waits inhabits his songs, those literate oom-pah stomps through the most decrepit locales and bleak conditions, where humanism barely wrestles down despair."

- Jon Pareles, New York Times

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"Waits is one of our most adventurous musicians and Glitter and Doom Live demonstrates his willingness to push his songs into stranger territory in the live setting...It is really amazing how things can go from sinister to care-free to tender with such deft ease."

- Spectrum Culture

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"At the age of 60 Waits has a voice that has grown as rough as a sailor's beard, with the shadowy rasp of Howlin' Wolf and Captain Beefheart. The music sounds like tin cans and duck calls or, on the highlights "Goin' Out West" and "Such A Scream," like a blues band playing in a pawnshop after closing time. If CD's had odors, this one would smell like an old tow truck."

- Playboy

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"Even without video accompaniment, Waits' performance makes a visual impression. It's easy to imagine him onstage, equal parts carnival barker, barroom poet and street-corner prophet...Glitter and Doom will make you wish Waits would return to the Tampa area. C'mon Tom it's been 30 years!"

- Tampa Tribune

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"Those lucky enough to see a show on Tom Waits' 2008 'Glitter and Doom' tour had the chance to see one of the world's most inspired artists in his element. Waits is not only one of the best songwriters alive, he is one of the most distinctive music artists of the past 100 years. As a singer, Waits is almost frightening. He has the voice of an undead Louis Armstrong crossed with a divinely inspired wino. As off-putting as that might sound, it can be raggedly beautiful."

- Knoxville News-Sentinel

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"One of the greatest performances in Waits' extensive oeuvre."

- Paste

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"A de facto greatest hits of Waits' fourth decade of music, during which his gnarly adventurousness didn't made but only intensified."

- Pitchfork

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"Leave it to Tom Waits to let all the also-rans do their thing before releasing the album of the year as Thanksgiving looms."

- Pop Dose

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"Rasp-driven alter-ego come and go, swaddled in delectable cling-clang madness, telling stories born of a barfly/railroder state of mind...If a construction site is your idea of euphony, the jackhammer of a muse, you'll have plenty to cheer about here."

- The Salt Lake Tribune

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

“Glitter and Doom Live joins Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) and Big Time (1988) as chronicles of the awesome and, across the span of years, protean experience that is Tom Waits live…In the case of most of these tracks, their live rendition is the sum of both gains and losses…songs appear in versions that instantly become definitive.”

- Drowned In Sound

DATE

01/15/10

Critics' Quotes, Glitter and Doom Live

"His band calibrates its rawness, equally capable of a lurching blues and a delicate pizzicato waltz, and his voice is thick and slurred but can always summon tenderness. A second disc is a half-hour montage of stage patter...It's as surreal as his songs, only funnier."

- Jon Pareles, New York Times

DATE

01/15/10