This month’s featured record is Tom Waits eclectic sprawling 1985 masterpiece. The second album of a loose musical trilogy, it’s nineteen consistently great and evocative songs populated by a cast of oddballs, losers and freaks.

Rain Dogs is stuffed full of bold production choices, exotic instrumentation, junkyard percussion and found sounds recorded around New York all delivered in Waits’s inimitable voice. The recording choices, Waits’s reliance on real, unadorned, unprocessed sounds and performances which made it sound so out of place in the 80’s now sound years ahead of the time. It’s a striking and brilliant album, one which is particularly flattered by the Vinyl format.