Live at the Gilman House

If you were to speak to any of my friends or family they would tell you that, aside from a slightly unhealthy obsession in Eldritch horrors, my overwhelming obsession for the past 30 years or so has been Tom Waits. I can't remember what prompted me to buy Raindogs at 16 while all my friends were listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers but buy it I did and things were never the same again. I hadn't heard anything like it. I was just starting making films (I have a long-neglected degree in filmmaking - sadly everything went digital right after I graduated) and these songs felt like movies in my head. I promptly tracked down Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years (followed swiftly by everything else) and vividly remember playing Frank's Wild Years for the first time alone in a darkened room and it scaring the shit (are we allowed to swear on here?) out of me - in the best possible way. I've been lucky enough to see Tom Waits live twice and live in hope that I may have the opportunity again, however that hope, along with the hope for a new album, has been gradually dwindling. In short I have had a huge slightly scary Waitsian itch to scratch and this album has filled that dark, gravel voiced void. The perfect album for Nighthawks at the Gilman House (and for me).

A great album, the vinyl version is a delight and the design of the sleeve adds to the fun. Highly recommended.

An absolute must have

I have been a trombonist since my latest years of primary school.  Since then, I have played more than my fair share of jazz.  Yet across those decades, I was not enabled to fancy this American signature genre of music.  It never really "sang" to me as a vocalist from an international line of accomplished classical musicians.  While at university as a music student, my department never went out of its way to support a barely existing jazz program, and one faculty member even openly bore the unfortunate attitude of "just play it twice and call it jazz" when accounting for performance errors and imprecisions.  In time, I somehow managed to adopt jazz as an acquired taste, and I am elated to learn that my former institution of music education currently has a dynamically flourishing platform for promoting jazz.  Besides, these 1920s and 1930s of such concern to us as enthusiasts of H.P. Lovecraft's era and works encapsulate the definitive Jazz Age of the United States - that perfectly imperfect musical expression of the more dirty, gritty, and nasty aftermaths of the Great War which slithered against the grain of just about everything that preceded it and inevitably touched every facet of America's cultural, industrial, and technological developments.  Within the context of these considerations and characterisations, this remarkably clever, faithful, and imaginative album was both arranged and performed with a theatrically musical ability certainly worthy of our H.P.L.H.S. forum!

I agree with all the other reviews that this is not only very creative, with a lot of inside jokes to delight Lovecraftians, but also has the highest production values. Take a listen to the sample, which does capture the idea. I look forward to getting the the other album, Live in Stockholm. And I hope more records in the series gets produced in the near future.