Three discs worthy of Waits

Tom Waits

“Orphans” (Anti-)

****

WHEN Tom Waits throws a scrap-yard sale, don’t expect to find the merchandise neatly shelved and cataloged. The songs on the epic new collection from pop music’s crackpot inventor are grouped into three thematic/stylistic categories -- “Brawlers,” “Bawlers” and “Bastards” -- but you’re pretty much on your own as you sort through three hours of new recordings, unreleased tracks, soundtrack selections, collaborations, items from anthologies and tribute albums -- 56 songs, 30 of them new, all tossed into their respective piles.

That’s the way it should be with Waits, an intuitive, ornery artist who values the mystery of music too much to pull back the veil and reveal all its workings. Presented without a road map, “Orphans” (in stores Tuesday) is a teeming, seething menagerie too antic to be corralled, a leviathan too vast to be easily grasped.

This is a fulfillment of the ideal Waits has represented throughout his more than three decades of distinctive work: the self-willed outsider and artful primitive with a gift for literary creation and unfettered musical imagination.

The first CD, “Brawlers,” is defined by primal blues and itchy, twitchy rock. “Bawlers” gathers his sepia-toned ballads and other reflective material, while “Bastards” cooks to the hipster cadence of monologues, cabaret and offbeat experiments. Waits’ career-long grounding in the imagery of a mythic, bygone America assumes even more depth and resonance in this panoramic scale.

But there’s a big world under each umbrella. The music on “Brawlers” ranges from lowdown rockabilly and blues to Waits’ Ramones tribute, and its verses are populated by colorful characters engaged in the business of hustling, drifting, suffering and coping.

When Waits looks to the world’s biggest brawlers, he comes up with one of his most powerful works: “Road to Peace” recounts bloody episodes in the Arab-Israeli conflict, devastating in its detail and despairing in its conclusion that God himself is lost and needs help.

Waits (always in collaboration with his wife and co-writer, Kathleen Brennan) grapples with matters of sin and redemption in a masterpiece on the “Bawlers” CD, “Down There by the Train,” a primal gospel song about that place where all can be forgiven.

Sometimes he’s just funny (the singer of “Lie to Me” seems to be aroused by being deceived), or teary-eyed touching (“Bottom of the World”) or drunk with language (“Forty monkeys drowning in a boiling sea / Everywhere I go it rains on me”).

It’s almost too much, really, but Waits doesn’t release albums very often, so you can make it last. This is one to salt away to sustain you through many winters of the soul.

-- Richard Cromelin

Albums are reviewed on a scale of four stars (excellent), three stars (good), two stars (fair) and one star (poor).