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Tom Waits used to take years between records. These days he fires them out. “Real Gone” (Epitaph), his most recent CD, has a backstory: for the first time, Waits shut the lid on his piano, and the songs are filled with spiky guitar from Marc Ribot, who put his stamp on Waits’s best eighties work. The results are excellent. The lyrics are predictably surreal; the vocals are more cavernous than ever; and the rhythms, when they’re not roughing up the blues, borrow from Latin and island music. “Hoist That Rag,” an indictment of American imperialism, has the force of an uppercut, and “Metropolitan Glide,” the firstever Tom Waits dance number, returns him to the urban world after years as a rustic. “Real Gone” is real long, which isn’t necessarily a problem: “Sins of the Father,” a simmering blues that is one of the album’s strongest songs, runs more than ten minutes.
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