Scott Walker "Bish Bosch"

Yeah. For some reason I've been reaching for this a lot more than I did when I first got The Drift.

loved this at first listen, don't really want to listen to anything else. good accompaniment for all holiday activities.

streaming on spotify btw

i haven't fallen this hard for one of his albums since i first heard Scott 2

Finding it impossible to listen to this when the sun is out.

album of the year

this one has the upper hand on The Drift for its earthy humour and bigger dynamic and rhythmic shifts. Tilt remains my favourite masterpiece because it has enough of the orchestral, balladeering, crooning Scott - it's a mixture of the two approches, really. The Drift pretty much dispensed with that trait of his, which returns in select points on the latest.

album of the year for me, too.

I haven't listened to this yet! This is the first SW album where I can afford to promptly go out and buy vinyl and debut it thataway so I'm holding off until the right listening opportunity presents itself

Annnnnnd...my interview is live:

http://www.spin.com/articles/scott-walker-bish-bosch-interview-MP3s

Way to go, the Nedster. He's plugging the arse of this album, old Scott.

nice one, yeah i'm surprised at how much press he's doing

Oooh yay gonna read it right now!

Looking forward to that appearance on the One Show (xp)

hah, i'd actually LOVE to see that. The interview in this video (skip past the shoddy music video recording) is pure buttclench LOLs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=3e8vpoj0lDs

great interview ned. if i could ask him one question, i'd wonder what's with all the greek references. el greco, drachmas, athens, bears/romans, etc

You must always, if possible, allow enough stand-back room so that you remember the initial pleasures you had when it was all coming to you in its embryonic stages. If you're not careful, the many things that are happening around you in the studio can kill those gifts.

This is so true and so difficult IME.

(about many kinds of creation)

one of the best interviews with him I've read anywhere. bravo Ned. much better than the Toop one! your questions are especially incredibly interesting, no wonder he comes across as very much interested in answering them.

on an unrelated note, uncanny how much young Walker resembles young Julian Cope (his ardent fan and proselytizer at that time). it's something that recurs on and on in pop genealogy when you think about it, making somewhat of a point of "becoming what you eat" or something.

in '80s Yugoslavia, where I grew up, there was this hugely popular Croatian cover of 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore' (you'll spot 'Ashes to Ashes' Bowie all over it):

http://youtu.be/-OkmaK7uJDw

Wonderful interview, Ned. Love this:

I'm always surprised when people make comments like, "What happened to melody in your work?" I hear an abundance of melody in it, and even better melody than I wrote before.

I always find that, if you swapped Walker for latter-day Sylvian and put him into his chair, the interviews would work pretty much the same as they are.
I wonder what the two of them think about each other's work right now. I expected Toop (a known Sylvian fan) to raise the name with Scott at any moment, but he never did.

sylvian's nine horses album a couple years back sounded especially like a scott album

Scott did sort of compare and contrast himself with Sylvian a little in the 1995 Wire interview.

xpost - really? I find it nothing like, I was thinking (maybe more obviously) about the latest, Manafon.
thanks about the Wire interview info, Jon.

the lyrics and crooning delivery are very engel, "the banality of evil" particularly ~ "king of the castle, room at the top, off with their heads, chop 'em off. hey, hello neighbor, right you are" ~

right, I can see it in the lyrics - thanks! maybe one day I'll be able to hear it in Sylvian's voice, too. for now, jaded cantankerous Sylvian fan here, who thinks everything he sang on Nine Horses and the last one is identical in tone and identically dull in delivery (I wish I could hear Scott, or anything else there, really).

and, to link this observation with the melody critique to Scott, it is somewhat true his melodies are frequently much the same, both on The Drift and Bish Bosch. this is why I tend to drift (pardon the pun) on the second half of BB.

but then, Bjork's melodies are often much the same, too.

dave's vibrato on the nine horses album has a little bit of bryan ferry in it but sounds an awful lot like scott's

I've managed three tracks so far. The opening track is pretty strong, in a bludgeony way, Corps De Blah has several beautiful 30sec chunks which don't add up to much and Phrasing has stuck in my head as the best of the three. I don't know when I'll get around to the 21min track.

You can position it in a different way - I would think you put more of yourself to when you get to play the record.

With Walker's later records its not so much about how many times you get to play them but the gap of time between each play.

I understand the 21-min track can sound overwhelming as a prospect, but really it is so diverse than it's also the most entertaining.

with this record I like how, on first spins, you don't know exactly which is the beginning and which the ending of the various tracks.

it is somewhat true his melodies are frequently much the same, both on The Drift and Bish Bosch

"Tilt" is esp. guilty of recycling melodies from "Climate of Hunter" imo, not so much recycling them as he can't seem to work out what melodies will fit the music. Have I told you all I don't like "Tilt" all that much, or as much as I once did?

I haven't listened to it for some time now, but I still think it remains my favourite. I'm a sucker for classic arrangements, I find they haven't quite exhausted their emotional punch. it's always a breath of fresh vista I get when that know Walkerish string cloud comes to hover under his voice (or is his voice hovering over that harmonic cloud). The Drift was too sameish for me, especially for a long album. I like variety, that's why I like Bish Bosch better. but yes, I guess Tilt remains the best of both worlds for me.

you're quite right about the same melodies employed on Tilt and, say, 'Sleepwalker's Woman'. but I almost don't notice that because I so like that harmonic context and his change of tone when singing over it. when the same trick unexpectedly comes up for a brief while in one of the 'cosmic void' sections of 'Zercon', I'm a happy boy.

I'm on the verge of coming round to to the opinion that "Climate of Hunter" is his best post-60s album - just a pity about the fretless bass

I love the fretless! it suits him quite well on that record : )
in general, I don't understand people rewriting history so to speak (and the fretless being a pet peeve: God, talk about invalidating whole careers - Mick Karn comes to mind). is it an '80s album? well, accept it for an '80s album it is. a work of art doesn't grow apart from its context. we will get to hear charges about 'over-drily recorded vocals' from the 2000s soon enough. 'tis all good, and it's everything for grabs (and enjoyment).

I love the fretless too!

The only "production error" I hear on CoH onward-- obv this is the most personal observation ever-- is that I find the drums and "static, noisy elements" on Tilt to be dated and ineffective. Pola X soundtrack seemed like an exercise in How To Make Noise, like he worked out those details

Me I love that "Farmer in the city" is a late-period Romantic one-off, absolutely my favourite latter day track (with "Clara" close behind) and made all the more powerful by its singularity.

I love the fretless on CoH too. What bothers me is the electric guitar solos.

That's a nice observation abt 'Farmer'. Totally OTM.

On a personal note, there is always a part of me that loves "Farmer" so much that I just want to go "full Phantom" on a new song but then I think of Neil Hannon and think better of it

awww Casanova is still a great record.

I don't find 'Farmer' a particularly one-off moment on that album, which is littered I think with many equally romantic crooning moments throughout (think 'Patriot (a single)'). which is really why it stays my favourite album of his, as I've stated upthread.
the one-off moment for me is 'Rosary', though. I remember I wanted to hear a whole album full of such 'rosaries'.

Oh yeah, for sure! "As in the wind!" etc. is the most scene-chewing moment on the entire record, but it's more "Romanticism deployed as a device" rather than the backbone of the sonic world.

And as for "Rosary", I thought "A lover loves" was a suitable rejoinder

quite right so, I meaned that just in the context of that album. I like his guitar playing a lot.

Hey, thanks to all for the kind comments re: the interview. It's cut down from the overall transcript, BTW, so I might put up the other answers later.

Oh ned please do!

I revisited Pola X and And Who Will Go to the Ball? both twice this week. They're good but neither has anything like that feeling of startling inner necessity of the song albums. They feel like workshop pieces. The two songs for Ute Lemper, on the other hand, are every bit as good as anything he's ever done. I don't know why no one ever asks him about them. (Did you, perhaps, Ned?)

No, I just concentrated on the current album.

I'll be very glad if you do that, Ned, thanks in advance.
it's not just about Scott, it's your template was so good to begin with. so, I'd like to have more of a good thing.

Has anyone read The Impossible Dream: The Story of Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers? Worthwhile at all?

(back in the Tilt era I read the Deep Shade of Blue bio...)

There is a pretty good interview with SW and Peter Walsh, his longtime producer in this month's Sound on Sound magazine.

Oh, "Dimple" is terrific. That's my take-away classic from this so far, a la "Jesse" and "Farmer in the City". (I haven't got to the last two tracks yet).

vinyl sounds amazing! they did an amazing job. you could definitely use it as some demented reference record for fancy speakers. the tones are all over the place so it would work well. just a great transfer however they did it. very little surface noise. which obviously means a lot if you have fancy speakers. my ancient - not so fancy but nice - speakers like this record a lot.

I listened to SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter) the other day while reading the lyrics. I couldn't sleep afterwards. This album, it is unlike other things.

Having attempted to listen to this in a darkened room in full on vinyl last night, I've come to the conclusion that it's pretty much impossible to listen to this album all the way through, even if you love Walker's steez. By the end of the third side my mate and I had both agreed that we'd started tuning out and that it just sounded like a TV had been switched on in the room. This isn't really a bad thing. I think the value of these tracks work best when heard apart; maybe on headphones rather than in a room with other people.