While not as experimental as Bone Machine or Swordfishtrombones and less immediately disarming than Small Change or Nighthawks At The Diner, Rain Dogs is nevertheless the pinnacle of Tom Waits’ career and the apotheosis of his artistic vision. It is the first album that pairs him with redoubtable guitarist Marc Ribot, whose contributions to Rain Dogs cannot be overstated, even alongside such formidable players as Robert Quine and Keith Richards. Ribot sounds like he was invented in one of Waits’ secret basement contraptions for the express purpose of providing the knotty, cleaving counterpart to Waits’ increasingly skeletal subterranean blues. “Singapore” captures an exultant-sounding Waits growling over what sounds like an invasion of militaristic termites storming a birdhouse; “Hang Down Your Head” and “Downtown Train” (the latter covered by Rod Stewart, who regrettably makes it his own) are poppy minor key laments in the Springsteen tradition; the twerking, polyrhythmic “Jockey Full of Bourbon” conjures a constellation of washboards being repeatedly struck by lightning; and “Cemetery Polka” finds Waits delightedly chawing language like so much cud (“Independent as a hog on ice”). Everywhere, scuttling guitar lines stick and move, vocals goad like emaciated buzzards, and drums sound like loops of pot lids being repeatedly dropped onto distressed wood. As an album, Rain Dogs is practically a Waits primer, a holistic cataloguing of Waits’ many idiosyncratic inventions, and the most fitting introduction to the work of this unusual and gifted artist.