Tom Waits Blood Money 180g LP (Metallic Silver Vinyl)

Blood Money uses the same template and players as Alice (released at the same time) and first saw life as an opera production by Robert Wilson. It's Waits' treatment of Georg Buchner's 1837 socio-political play, Woyzek, which premiered in 2000 in Copenhagen. It's a dark morality play performed in a style where a barker from a medicine show is mysteriously transported to the Weimar Republic via Tin Pan Alley.

Disturbing and delirious when it's not romantic and hilarious, the songs have a much more direct emotional appeal than the surrealistic Alice.

20th Anniversary Edition pressed on 180-gram metallic silver vinyl

In all, Blood Money, like its sister, Alice, is a record steeped in musical and lyrical traditions barely remembered by popular culture and hence very rarely evoked (from carnival marches to tarantellas, primitive tangos, and early 20th century jazz). This isn't the other side of Tin Pan Alley, but an appreciation for and evocation of the music of the Weimar Republic with its easy pathos and often grotesque funhouse humor. That said, this appreciation does not make for a re-creation; Waits' music is his own from this particular place in time, but it illustrates and illuminates particular kinds of human foibles from the present era and celebrates them as human nonetheless.