Tom said, ‘Yeah, and the first one’s always free’ and of course that went right in.”[3] Lorraine Ari of Rolling Stone gave the album four out of five stars: "Just when it seemed that Los Angeles' premier bar casualty could not get any weirder, on his 15th album, Tom Waits teams up with beat writer William Burroughs (who turns up one song) to score a 19th century opera...The rich, dizzying tunes incorporate graveyard fright noises, bizarre piano sounds and creepy sci-fi whistles into traditional, orchestrated Fiddler on the Roof-style melodies...

Although this odd, operatic collaboration with Burroughs and Wilson does not completely fit in with the whiskey-and-bar-stool concept of Waits' previous albums, it does continue his intriguing expansion into more surreal realms.

"[14] Chris Willman of the Los Angeles Times gave the album three out of four stars: "The story line is only partially apparent in this score, with Waits taking particular relish in essaying Scratch as another one of his carnival barker characters.

Mostly it sounds a lot like the next Tom Waits album, with much the same unholy mixture of calliope-like chamber music, brutally melodic percussion and tortured lyricism as last year’s Bone Machine.

'November' opens with the unearthly, theremin-like sound of a bowed saw, and the song is essentially a catalogue of morbid, gloomy wintry imagery set to an organic, skeletal soundtrack of plucked banjo, accordion and pleasingly woody bass notes.

Waits’ voice is at its expressive, elemental best and some of the lyrics, which conjure a dark, backwoods mysticism, are astoundingly nasty for such a pretty song: 'With my hair slicked back/ With carrion shellac/ And blood from a pheasant/ And the bone from a hare…' Just as beautiful but less morbid and cold, 'The Briar and the Rose' is a ballad of almost Victorian sentimentality.

Hans-Jörn Brandenburg, Volker Hemken, Henning Stoll, Christoph Moinian, Dieter Fischer, Jo Bauer, Frank Wulff, and Stefan Schäfer were The Devil's Rhubato Band (Hamburg); Ralph Carney, Bill Douglas, Kenny Wollesen, Matt Brubeck, Joe Gore, Nick Phelps, Kevin Porter, Lawrence "Larry" Rhodes, Francis Thumm, Don Neely, Linda Deluca were The Rhubato West Group (San Francisco).