Tom Waits - Blood Money

Tom Waits wrote Blood Money for the stage, and this remastered pressing shows the songs never needed a theatre to draw blood.

Released in 2002 alongside its twin, Alice, the album gathers songs Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote for Robert Wilson's staging of Woyzeck, Georg Büchner's unfinished play about a soldier driven to murder. Taken off the stage, they become a self-contained portrait of love, jealousy and violence, sung by a man who sounds like he has seen it all up close.

The band is a gloriously odd one: marimba, calliope, pump organ, bass clarinet, cello and creaking percussion, recorded with a warmth that makes the menace feel almost cosy. "Misery Is the River of the World" opens the record like a carnival barker reading out a death notice, while "God's Away on Business" growls about a world left to crooks, with Stewart Copeland pounding the drums.

Then the knife goes in gently. "All the World Is Green" is one of the loveliest ballads in his songbook, a woozy waltz of regret, and "The Part You Throw Away" lingers like smoke in an empty bar.

The remastering gives those bruised textures room to breathe, which suits a record so concerned with what people do in the dark. For Waits devotees, it sits near the top of his later work.