A misbegotten, footsore bone-crushing trek through the industrial badlands of Northern Germany finally left me in a single hotel room in Frankfurt uncorking a dutyfree bottle of Old Bushmills. Next day I was getting the hell out of the beerswilling, sausage-eating, craphouse, but tonight there was just the bottle of Bush and some lines from 'Tom Traubert's Blues': "No one speaks English/and everything's broken" – yeah, damn right – "Old Bushmills I staggered, you buried the dagger…"

The human situation is fraught with confusion and uncommunication, with stupidity and emptiness as well as business and meaning, and all are laced with sadness and humour. The strength of Tom Wait's work is that he encapsulates it all, and with an affectionate eye that misses neither freckle nor wart. Between the bottle label and the room call, I was glad to have his imagery for company.

Tonight is not so different. In the empty wasted wash after finishing a mammoth interview, with a bottle of Jameson (cheaper than Bushmills) between me and the cold, I got another set of Waits songs on the deck, ranting and bleeding images across the shadows.

Strangely enough 'Heartattack and Vine' sounds like a half-way house between 'Small Change' and 'Blue Valentine'. The mighty ballads retain the strength and acute vision of his late 70's work and the raucous uptempo songs use the same hoarse Big Jimmy Smith small-combo R'n'B of the last album.

However, the album doesn't seem as conceptually whole as previous albums. There's a tiredness there, the vision seems darker, and narrower, as he moves from observer to damned participant, from bar-room visionary poet to back-street loner musician. His raucous songs are filled with words of violence (even when not dealing directly with violence itself) and the language of despair. The observation, wit and humour of a song like 'Small Change' or 'Step Right Up' seem lost.

Now we have him bellowing the title track at length over a perfunctory mid-50's R'n'B group – "You know there's no devil, its just God when he's drunk" – and the tubular world where there's a Mexican whorehouse opposite a Catholic church comes coughing and wheezing out.

In 'Downtown', a violent retort to the tweeness of Petula Clarke's song of the same name, and to every glamorisation of the bright lights, he roads: "I want to break your bottle/Spill out all your charms", and he groans the title into the backstreets.

'Mr. Siegel', on side 2 brings more nightmares and a plea – "You gotta tell me why are the wicked so strong"… "When the good die young they got a good looking corpse everytime…"

And yeah these songs are good, but leaving aside the question of vision, the R'n'B basis, unlike the more fluid, string-based jazz of his late 70's stuff, seems to restrict his vocal possibilities. That old backbeat just keeps on slapping down, making it right hard to get too loose.

But the ballads… aaah, the ballads.

'Saving All My Love For You' is great, and 'Jersey Girl' is a bellowing song of devotion over a boardwalk beat. Shalala, from the Drifters to 'Pretty Flamingo' to 'Street Hassle' to Van Morrison to Bruce Springsteen. We all got the Jersey Shalala sometime and Waits is in love with a Jersey girl, sing shalala and this would be a good single too.

'Ruby's Arms', with its Salvation Army brass, reminiscent of (say) 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' (wordings and intonations) is another. But 'On The Nickel' is the one. Immensely moving, with a great, timeless strength. Tonight, and maybe its got something to do with private psychosis, but it's the one that cuts closest to the bone. The zip in the chest is undone, and it touches something inside. Soul?

"What becomes of all the little boys/Who never their hair/They wind up all around the park/On the nickel and they're over there"…

And I think of all the children real and imagined, "Who never say their prayers'/Who run away from home/The world keeps getting bigger, When you get out on your own", and some of them died from dope, some from themselves, some from others. Some are clerks, others are gunmen. Some just are… and a few, brothers, sisters and friends, got through the net…

Like 'Tom Trouberts Blues' in a room in Frankfurt, 'On The Nickel' is so full of human resonance that only a stone could remain unmoved. It makes up for the misses elsewhere on this record.