“I feel like a preacher wavin’ a gun around,” snarls Tom Waits in “Shake It.” And he sounds like that too.

With Real Gone, he takes the platform in a year of idealistic campaign language and proceeds to preach hellfire and brimstone, pointing to those neglected passages of national history that expose what goes on in the dark alleys of the land of the free. Slavery. Murder. Tyrannical abuses of power. Empty sloganeering, employed to distract from corruption. It’s an ugly tour, but Waits’ humor and invention make it all worthwhile, along with an increasingly world-weary perspective that leans ever more forcefully into God’s promises, like Job trying to test God’s assurances, demanding to know “How’s it going to end?”

Waits fans thought that Bone Machine was as far out on the fringes of musical madness that this mad hatter would ever venture. But Real Gone is even madder … real gone right over the edge.

“Top of the Hill” sounds like a freight train climbing a mountain of mud, and Tom's running alongside saying, "Stop and Get Me on the Ride Up." It's as playful and raucous as the Mule Variations opener "Big in Japan," full of zany and arbitrary rhymes: "There's very little leeway / I seen a mattress on the freeway." It also sets the album's end-of-the-world tone: "Have all the lights burned out on heaven again / I'll never roll the number 7 again." And it closes with a half-joking request for redemption and a second chance:

If I had it all to do all
Over again
I'd try to rise above the law of man
Why don'cha gimme nother
Sip of your cup
Turn a Rolls Royce into a
Chicken coup, uh huh

“Hoist That Rag” sounds like it was it was recorded in a trash can factory. “Metropolitan Glide” sounds grown men brawling and breaking all of the furniture.

And out there, beyond the borders of conventional rock instrumentation, he begins taking that exhaust-pipe voice of his and bend it into new shapes, creating an ensemble of new cacophonous instruments. Whole songs are driven on the percussion of his own huffing and puffing. In “Baby Gonna Leave Me,” he growls out the lines over a rhythm section comprised of an asthma attack.

But guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, a drummer called Brain, Primus's bass player Les Claypool, and Tom's own son Casey (on some percussion) provide brilliant musicality, turning this into a sort of chamber music from dark and dusty corners of forgotten history. For every song recorded somewhere in Waits’ ramshackle chest cavity (“Metropolitan Glide”), there’s another in the jazzy glow of the band’s groovy chemistry (“Dead and Lovely,” “Trampled Rose”), which recall the salon-style intimacy of Sam Phillips' latest records. Ribot turns in some of the strongest guitar work he’s contributed to the Waits canon, shifting effortlessly from the rusty edges of “Hoist that Rag” to the mournful beauty of “The Day After Tomorrow.”

“Don’t Go Into That Barn” warns us to avoid a sinister scene in which echoes of cruel slavery still resonate. These songs stir up the dust and uncover the evidence of our recent wrongs, things we’d like to pretend are ancient history. These things may be “real gone” in that new generations are learning about them from history books, but they’re still real, no matter how strongly we wish they weren’t. And all along the way, the dark clouds of the end of the world draw nearer, giving us less and less time to make amends. “It’s last call somewhere in the world.”

And yet, some of these lyrics suggest a history that is all too contemporary. In “Hoist that Rag,” the snarling, sneering singer lashes out at a devil enjoying the privilege of leadership, a leader who seems naive about the world: "The sun is up the world is flat / Damn good address for a rat." The song is a withering rant against the flag-waving jingoism that covers a multitude of campaign trail sins.

But Waits goes one better than most celebrities who don the mantle of political protester. He follows that song with “Sins of the Father,” a lament for the wrongs of our predecessors and then a vow to go and make things right, to blaze the trail of a better future. First, though, he takes aim at the religiosity of our Commander in Chief yet again:

Smack dab in the middle of a dirty lie
The star spangled glitter of his one good eye
Everybody knows that the game was rigged
Justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig
Dark town alleys been hiding you
Long bell tolling is your waterloo
Oh baby what can you do
Does the light of god blind you
Or lead the way home for you?

He again admits his crimes in "Make It Rain," even as he calls out for help he doesn't deserve. And there's a hint that heaven's "gatekeepers" are spending their time in pious abuse of the damned:

I'm not Able, I'm just Cain
Open up the heavens
Make it rain!

I'm close to heaven
Crushed at the gate
They sharpen their knives
On my mistakes

The album ends with a letter that could have arrived just this week—a testimony of longing in a soldier’s heart to return home “The Day After Tomorrow.” This sends us off with a palpable reminder that, whoever we voted for, we’re rushing headlong into a history that will cost the lives of brave and frightened souls. It's enough to make us pause and reconsider the cost of each day we make war in the name of freedom.