REVIEW: Scott Walker
If you have ever longed for a track that opens with a full minute of electronic birdsong, or wondered “What do souls who die have in common?” then Scott Walker’s followup to 1995’s Tilt is going to tick the boxes. If you have not then for God’s sake do not give it its first listen under any kind of influence — it is potentially the soundtrack to the worst trip of your life.
Discordant guitars, irregular drumming and near-silence splay themselves across seventy minutes of unabashed surrealism. “I am crawling around on my hands and knees, smoothing out the prairie,” wails Walker in his tragic baritone on Jesse, part acid-era Lennon, part Phantom of the Opera. This is self-indulgent, overblown, affectation. Towards the end of the second track a noise cuts through the string section that could easily be the scream of a studio sound engineer losing the will to live.
Despite all this, up to a point the sincerity of the earnest vocals and the darkness of the lyrics validate the sentiment, at least until it all just gets too much and you cannot deal with the navelgazing. For me this moment came in the form of the braying of a donkey. Like an old house, The Drift is full of inexplicable noises, unexpected finds and several ghosts. This album could very well be complete bullshit, but there is just a chance that it is genius.
The jury may be out but one thing is for certain: Walker’s days of easy listening are over.
18th May 2006