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EAST OF SUNSET
MVD
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As doomed-from-the-start projects go, you won’t find one with better intentions than a Tom Waits tribute album. After all, who could be mad at anybody for trying to give the gruff old dog some shine? The problem is that Waits’s songs are made for him and him alone, and very seldom are they improved on by other musicians. The DVD part of this CD/DVD set is Brian McNelis’s East of Sunset, an artsy (read: boring) film about artsy (read: junkie) people with a score of covers of early-period Waits tunes. On the 18-track CD, most of the Waits material is performed by " Caseworker, " who come off like a Spooky-era Lush on barbiturates, drowning every ounce of Waits’s charming machismo with their mextrosexual ennui. The rest of the contributors, including Alex Chilton and Pete Shelley, phoned it in; only Lydia Lunch’s sloppy, shambling take on " Heartattack & Vine " comes anywhere close to the mark.
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