T Bone Burnett

Tooth of Crime will speak to fans of the Latin Playboys, Tom Waits and other eccentrics who subvert roots music with Beat-era bohemia and jazzy cool. This has been Burnett's m.o. since the Alpha Band days. (BTW, where in tarnation are those reissues?) Each of these 10 tracks creeps up the lapel like a 60-year-old spider, looking to talk weather as if it's a Masonic conspiracy. Burnett doesn't change a whole heck of a lot from album to album. At the same time, nobody really sounds like the dude.

The best song on T Bone's relentlessly noir new album is "Kill Zone," a lyrical, Roy
Orbison-style ballad — which Orbison himself co-wrote right before his death in 1988. That
fact only hints at the oddity of this collection: Burnett, best known as producer to the stars
(Robert Plant/Alison Krauss, John Mellencamp) and curator of soundtracks (The Big
Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?), started writing these songs years ago f... More >