Tom Waits "Rain Dogs" [1985]

By the time Cookie Monster-voiced alcoholic weirdo Tom Waits released "Rain Dogs" in the mid-80s, somehow his worsening musical condition -- a haphazard collage of bad fiction and an odorous stew of junkyard jazz and junkie blues-rock in the aftermath of a burned-down circus -- was making it onto critics' "best-of" lists, and he was lauded as some sort of creative visionary. But unless your tastes somehow descend to a low-budget theater stage recreating vignettes from the Great Depression, there's no reason to go slumming with this record. Perhaps Waits' effort lent guilt-ridden Reagan-era yuppies the chance to get gritty without actually needing to wash their hands. "Rain Dogs" does this along with plenty of other useless things, like demonstrating what David Johansen covering Leonard Cohen on a handful of pills would sound like. Not even cubist guitar art-dick Marc Ribot, tortured-goose sax honker John Lurie or animated corpse Keith Richards could rescue this drowning lowlife of an album; time to put "Rain Dogs" down and go take a bath.