Swordfishtrombones finds Waits returning after a three-year absence, with a pivotal release that effectively closes one chapter and opens another. Like Paul’s Boutique, Swordfishtrombones is the rare album that provides a funhouse mirror reflection of the culture that produced it, offering an unlikely collision of sounds and ideas. Crucially, the album would begin an unbroken trend of self-produced Tom Waits albums, and it shows; it may be the only album in history to credit no fewer than three different glass harmonica players. Previously, most of the sounds heard on a Tom Waits album could be easily attributed to specific instruments; Swordfishtrombones dispenses with such transparency. Even the instruments that can be indentified by ear – marimbas, chord organs, xylophones, bagpipes – are recorded to sound as if they are experiencing vertigo, or curdling. While a few songwriter-y tendencies linger in the form of the sweet “Johnsburg, Illinois” (birthplace of Brennan), the yearning “In The Neighborhood,” and the solemn “Soldier’s Things,” the disparity between where Waits left off on his last album with “Ruby’s Arms” and where he begins on Swordfishtrombones with “Underground” is jarring. The songs are brief, strange and remorseless: The bone-rattling “16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six” provides the template for the clanging, expressionist blues that would ingratiate Waits to a new generation of punks and adventurous indie rockers; “Shore Leave” sounds like Amon Duul I with a case of Thunderbird and a Moleskine; and tasty instrumental “Dave The Butcher” could pass for Atlantis-era Sun Ra. Singling out individual songs from Swordfishtrombones, however, does the album a disservice; this bricolage of mysticism, mayhem, and machines is best experienced in a single sitting.