The soundtrack to the movie Big Bad Love, made from Larry Brown's collection of stories is, as it should be, a very Southern affair - more accurately, a thing of the Mississippi hill country, also acting as a very effective ad for the Fat Possum label, since seven of the tracks here come from their artists.
What will attract a lot of people to this disc is the appearance of two new Tom Waits tracks. "Long Way Home" takes him on the kind of blues route that's become so familiar in his work - a kind of enigmatic blues that remains a love song and a promise for the future, putting it in the same realm as "Jayne's Blue Wish," a Waits-ian lullaby with gentle, if sometimes disturbed, dreams for tomorrow, his guitar work cast into relief by a quiet trumpet solo…
Peter Laughner was a singer songwriter from Cleveland like no other. Before his untimely death in 1977, he played in numerous bands, most notably Rocket From The Tombs and Pere Ubu, and also as a solo performer. He wrote for a variety of weekly newspapers and Creem, where he was a contemporary of Lester Bangs. He famously told Jane Scott of the Cleveland Plain Dealer that he wanted to do for Cleveland what “…Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York.” In many ways, Peter did in fact put the Cleveland underground on the map.
David Bowie returned to relatively conventional rock & roll with Scary Monsters, an album that effectively acts as an encapsulation of all his '70s experiments. Reworking glam rock themes with avant-garde synth flourishes, and reversing the process as well, Bowie creates dense but accessible music throughout Scary Monsters. Though it doesn't have the vision of his other classic records, it wasn't designed to break new ground – it was created as the culmination of Bowie's experimental genre-shifting of the '70s. As a result, Scary Monsters is Bowie's last great album. While the music isn't far removed from the post-punk of the early '80s, it does sound fresh, hip, and contemporary, which is something Bowie lost over the course of the '80s.