Real Gone follows the similarly overlong Mule Variations with another album of squelchy blues, caricatural dungeon-verse, and vaguely Latin-sounding arrangements. If this sounds like a retread, fair enough, but much of Real Gone finds Waits varying the formula just enough to avoid a rut. Real Gone also continues to illuminate guitarist Marc Ribot’s role as a valuable, even crucial, contributor ; his combinations of fractal, no-wave outbursts, fiery Cuban licks, and lubricated jazz runs remain as inventive as they are distinct. By now, Tom Waits albums have become more like collages than paintings, and these assemblages and appliqués can be dizzying. The highlights comprise some of Waits’ best work in years: the stentorian “Hoist That Rag,” is a masterpiece of whipcrack percussion and spidery guitars; the desolate and stone-cold “Sins Of My Father” gnaws at itself for over ten glorious minutes; and “How’s It Gonna End” is missing persons conjecture over the sounds of a demonic chain gang stepping into an inferno. Many other songs, however, are leaden and unnecessary: It is remarkable that it took Waits four decades to write a song called “Circus,” but by now these tired freakshow dispatches veer perilously close to self-parody; ditto the overreliance on the beatbox gimmick, which once sounded inventive and demonic but now, heard on a cluster of songs near the album’s back half, sound like time-marking. By the time a ‘hidden track’ and yet another beatbox appears, you’re exhausted, having forgotten what the first third of the album even sounded like. Like a CD-era hip-hop album bloated with skits and interludes, Real Gone is a great 40-minute album hidden inside a 72-minute long endurance test.