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Oct 25, 2011100Bad as Me, his first album of new material in seven years, is a tour de force of wise ol' swagger and new-century blues.
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Oct 21, 2011100An album which contains no filler at all, each track blooming in its own way like a collection of strange desert succulents, with a whole lot of hollerin' and a touch of Lieber-Stollerin'.
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Oct 20, 2011100The wild, rattling bawlers are each distinctively turbocharged with reckless and richly textured energy, while the ballads run poignantly on their rims, leaking emotion.
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Oct 19, 2011100A work of pure, true genius.
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Nov 29, 201191The three strongest tracks on Waits's most rocking album ever all feature not just Keith Richards but Tom's drummer son Casey.
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Oct 25, 201191Bad As Me is entry-level Waits for newcomers, and for longtime fans it's a fun reminder of Waits' ability to be a badass when necessary.
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Oct 21, 201191Without abandoning his classic formula--junkyard percussion, loose-limbed blues licks, and that unmistakable mouth-of-hell baritone--Waits keeps pulling switcheroos out of his porkpie hat on his 20th album.
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Dec 6, 201190At this moment, Bad As Me might be his best ever. [Nov 2011, p.68]
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Nov 3, 201190It's an album from a songwriter at the peak of his powers, having tempered his imaginatively destructive impulses with his affection for all things old, rough, and beautiful.
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Oct 31, 201190Co-written and produced by his missus Kathleen Brennan, Waits' songs--Bad as Me included--find their center immediately and stick like a record's skip.
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Oct 25, 201190Bad As Me sees the performer reaching back into his bag of tricks to pull out a few favourites in a characteristically exhilarating, terrifying, heartbreaking, tear jerking, bone-rattling style.
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Oct 25, 201190The fact that he can produce an album like Bad As Me, with more energy, invention and sheer excitement that artists half his age stands as testimony that Tom Waits remains one of the true giants of music.
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Oct 25, 201190It's Waits' best album since Rain Dogs, and may possibly be even better than that--only time will tell, but it will be time well spent.
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Oct 24, 201190Bad As Me is as good as it gets.
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Oct 24, 201190Going back to the well is generally frowned upon, but given the depth of Waits' well and the crispness and vitality drawn from it on Bad As Me, it hardly seems to warrant criticism that he has chosen to rummage through his past and revisit what he never had the heart, or mind, to throw away.
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Oct 10, 201190Even as he enters his 60s, Waits still sounds as lively and as cagey as ever, indulging both his most brazen and his most sentimental urges to upend all of our expectations.
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Jan 3, 201289Though Waits holds a reserved seat in the small club of artists who don't put out bad albums, the whiff of wild youth hangs around Bad as Me as if it was recorded in back alleys, behind churches, and in bars after hours.
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Oct 25, 201188Bad As Me is yet another sensational landmark on the long, well-traveled path of a man who simply refuses to age.
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Nov 16, 201185Throughout it all, it still feels like essential, singular Waits, like moody and manic are two sides of one very marked coin.
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Oct 24, 201183The whole thing is a bit ramshackle, but when he listens to his wife, Bad as Me is as good as anything Waits has ever done.
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Oct 24, 201181For all his indulgences, Waits never lingers too long; these tracks are concise and expertly edited, and Bad as Me feels as new as it does ancient.