BAD AS ME (Anti/Warner), the first album of new songs in seven years from Tom Waits, does not venture into any musical corners he hasn’t explored before. Guests like Keith Richards, Marc Ribot and Los Lobos’s David Hidalgo are familiar faces at Waits’s table, and they bring their specialised skills to the mix of Beefheartian blues hollers and bedraggled ballads that has long been his default setting. Even the way he incorporates a chorus of Auld Lang Syne into the closing New Year’s Eve repeats a trick he pulled off once before with Waltzing Matilda. And yet the set has an undeniable momentum, thanks to the brisk tempos and a general conciseness, making it an ideal entry point for anyone yet to be introduced to Waits’s world.
Since his first album 40 years ago, Ry Cooder has shown an unusual affinity for the sounds and songs of hard times gone by, revitalising such Depression artefacts as One Meat Ball and How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? Suddenly, his archaisms seem profoundly relevant again, and on PULL UP SOME DUST AND SIT DOWN (Nonesuch/Warner) he serves a set of originals that take well-aimed shots at such contemporary targets as Wall Street bankers and the American military, while nodding stylistically to such great songsters of the past as Uncle Dave Macon, Woody Guthrie and John Lee Hooker. Cooder’s gruff polemics are leavened with humour and underscored by a warm humanism, and his guitar playing is more finely nuanced than ever.