Chuck E Weiss - 23rd & Stout

Those too impatient to wait for Tom Waits's forthcoming 3-cd album, 'Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards', could probably not find better alleviation than Chuck E Weiss's stew of rugged blues and discombobulated jive tales of vagabonds and oddballs. A longstanding collaborator of Waits, as well as Lightning Hopkins and Johnny Depp, Weiss is far from a stylistic tribute. Blues is a fundamentally human music, and white man blues tends to manifest itself through hobos, vagrants, alcoholism and human oddities, no less valid an existential cry than any other. In many ways though, '23rd & Stout' is the perfect bridge between Waits' earlier swinging material, and his later sea-shanty experiments driven by clanking percussion, with masterfully guff
stortytelling backed by music that is bang up-to-date with twisted technique and simaltaneously pure country soul. Chuck E Weiss has spent most of his career, relatively, in the shadows of his friends, and with material such as this, that's a clear miscarriage of taste. [Ali Maloney]