Tom Waits - Alice (Metallic Gold Vinyl) (180g) (2LP)

Alice has been called Waits' long-lost masterpiece. Originally performed as an opera directed by Robert Wilson for Hamburg's Thalia Theatre in 1992, but left unrecorded until 2001, the show ran for a year and a half using an unusual orchestra designed by Waits to underpin the songs co-written with his wife Kathleen Brennen. Rather than being directly based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the Waits-Brennen Alice takes inspiration from feelings remembered and dreams recalled after reading the books.

It's been a long time since Tom Waits recorded an album as saturated with tenderness as this one. [Waits] has created, along with songwriting and life partner Kathleen Brennan, a love song cycle so moving and poetic that it's almost unbearable to take in one sitting....The melodies on Alice are easily the most direct Waits has written since Blue Valentine, but are more elegant than even those found on Foreign Affairs or Black Rider. Alice is no step back, but a further step toward oblivion - the place where the sound of desolation, the melody of loneliness, and the confused darkness at the root of the human heart come together and speak as one in a nursery rhyme for adults.