Track Listing

1. Whistlin' Past The Graveyard - Hawkins, Screamin' Jay
2. Pasties And A G String - Williams, Andre
3. Heart Attack And Vine - Lydia Lunch
4. Virginia Avenue - Knoxville Girls
5. Romeo Is Bleeding - Romweber, Dexter
6. New Coat Of Paint - Lee Rocker
7. Broken Bicycles - Botanica
8. Old Boyfriends - Preacher Boy & The Natural Blues
9. Please Call Me Baby - Norvell, Sally
10. On The Nickel - Bozulich, Carla
11. Muriel - Mandell, Eleni
12. Poncho's Lament - Blacks
13. Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis - Case, Neko
14. Blue Skies - Dixon, Floyd

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #129519 in Music
• Released on: 2001-04-23
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Forget that bit about imitation being the most sincere form of flattery: in music at least, an artist truly pays tribute to another by fully appropriating his work and making it his own. Such is the case on New Coat of Paint: Songs of Tom Waits, easily one of the best releases in the frequently tiresome genre of tribute albums. Indeed, the late Screamin' Jay Hawkins' delirious take on Waits's voodoo classic "Whistlin' past the Graveyard" is so dead-on that it's almost inconceivable he didn't write it. The same could be said for soul-man Andre Williams' sleazy version of "Pasties and a G-string", Flat Duo Jets' Dexter Romweber's manic "Romeo Is Bleeding" and Knoxville Girls' supremely tacky "Virginia Avenue". Lydia Lunch has been rewriting and singing "Heartattack And Vine" for at least 20 years, whether she wrote the original or not. Perhaps the single most impressive act of re-appropriation comes from one-man band Christopher Watkins, aka Preacher Boy, with a mournful, near-orchestral version of "Old Boyfriends". And a trio of torchy ballads from Congo Norvell's Sally Norvell, Geraldine Fibbers' Carla Bozulich and Eleni Mandell further illustrate the breadth of Waits' huge body of work. New Coat of Paint is given an inner cohesion by the incestuous connections of several of the acts, all veterans (appropriately) of LA's outlaw underground music scene. Perhaps the greatest compliment is that most of these tracks don't compare to the originals at all, but simply stand alone as classic compositions from the songbook of an iconoclastic American master of gutter-poetry. --Carl Hanni

Customer Reviews

It's good, but it's not Tom
Though there are some spine-tingling performances on this album (Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Botanica especially), this album only serves to show that Tom Waits is one of the finest songwriters alive today. This is definitely an album for hard-core Tom fans only- some of my friends have heard it are not convinced- like seeing a sequel without seeing the original, it's tricky to navigate Heart Attack and Vine sung by Lydia Lunch- her lazy delivery takes all the Heart Attack out.