TOM WAITS “Bone Machine” Island * *...

TOM WAITS “Bone Machine”

Island * * *1/2

For the musical equivalent of Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”--basically, an extended riff on its key line “we’ve all got it coming”--try “Bone Machine,” in which Waits waxes equally fatalistic on morality and mortality, if a lot less elegiac. Dig (no pun intended) these slap-in-the-face lines from “Dirt in the Ground”:

What does it matter, a dream of love

Or a dream of lies

We’re all gonna be in the same place when we die

Your spirit don’t leave knowing

Your face or your name

And the wind in your bones

Is all that remains.

That dirge appears early on as the album’s second song. Its first is the only slightly more life-affirming “Earth Died Screaming,” an abstract apocalypse where “the army ants leave nothin’ but the bones,” and in which Waits’ usual flair for non-drum-kit percussion sounds like a militia of the dead marching over busted xylophones toward a certain drowning in the river Styx.

So what amid all this casual morbidity makes “Bone Machine” so much--in a manner of speaking--fun? Waits’ obvious delight in his own low-fi, home-studio percussive discovery, for one thing.

When the rhythmic abrasiveness abates, cloaked under his most tortured vocal affectations are a few typically lovely ballads, including one co-written and sung with Keith Richards. And Waits unloads two of his most delightfully cheeky rockers ever with “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a catchy lament for fleeting youth, and “All Stripped Down,” in which he boldly equates the nakedness with which we’ll all greet the Great Beyond with the nekkidness with which he wants to be greeted by his gal.