*** TOM WAITS”The Black Rider” Island”Black Rider”...

*** TOM WAITS

“The Black Rider”

Island

“Black Rider” is Waits’ own vocal interpretation of a song score he wrote for a stage musical (staged by Robert Wilson, with text by William Burroughs). It’s most easily described as a Faustian musical-tragicomedy--but Faust is too classy a character for Waits. This variation on satanic soul-selling takes off from a 19th-century German story, “Gespensterbuch,” in which a hapless romantic buys magic bullets from the devil to win his bride in a shooting contest, and ultimately winds up killing her with one. Now that’s pathos of Waits-ian proportions.

The story line is only partially apparent in this score, with Waits taking particular relish in essaying Scratch as another one of his carnival barker characters. Mostly it sounds a lot like the next Tom Waits album, with much the same unholy mixture of calliope-like chamber music, brutally melodic percussion and tortured lyricism as last year’s “Bone Machine.”

This isn’t quite as superior a collection of songs as that was--but once again, cut through all the clatter and you’ll find some terrific ballad writing: “November has tied me / To an old dead tree / Get word to April / To rescue me.” Most song-crafters would sell their souls to write lines as good as those. New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).