New Scott Walker album: 'The Drift'

-- Momus (nic...) (webmail), Today 4:32 AM. (Momus) (later)

(X-post to Marcello)

That's actually the tubax, a saxophone the size of a tuba. But yes, fucking amazing sound.

put it this way: after listening to The Drift for a long time and then going back to Tilt, i was surprised at how melodic Tilt was.

also, almost everyone associated with scott is referring to this as "rockin" or "his rock record". it's a silly bit of spin, but be prepared.

*cries of joy*

Seth, that seems to me the key problem with Tilt and the little of Drift I've heard. The vocal lines seem all but arbitary, floating around in that ghostly register he seems to use

I agree, Lee. However, as someone else stated......TILT seems downright melodic compared to THE DRIFT.

Not released for another month, and yet the backlash has already begun!

The Drift is incredible.

The vocal lines in Tilt and Drift are about as far from "arbitrary" as you can get. EVERY word and EVERY sound on this album has a place.

And for those hankering after more melody, give it up! There is plenty melody – however brutal some of it may be. Anyway, why is melody so important? Do you only watch films with a clearly defined plot or a happy ending?
These songs work within the medium of music better than almost anything else I can think of. For decades now, Scott Walker's music has been about context and appearance but once you go deeper you find that it is also dealing with how it achieves that appearance [Thanks Jim]

It's not the lack of a melody, it's the fact that the melodies are frustratingly narrow in compass, and don't sound written (to me at least). The analogue with films is misleading. Films that work always seem to have an interior logic that make them work (Lynch, Bergman, Tarkovsky) even if that logic remains hidden to the viewer.

In other words, I never felt on Tilt that one day I was just going to 'get' the tunes. I just thought they were weak (and I don't mean 'not poppy'...), although often the music compensated. But not always. That said, I've heard ONE track from Drift, so I really ought to be quiet now.

I'm not sure what Tarkovsky has said about hidden logic but both He and Lynch seem to deal in dream language and metaphors for the human condition.
I agree with Lee Ward about the interior logic (Tarkovsky talked about Rhetoric and Haiku) but I hear this same integrity in Tilt and The Drift.
On a side note, didn't Tarkovsky aslo struggle with his spirituality – something Scott Walker described in a 1995 interview for The Wire.

I am curious how a melody can "sound written", I don't mean to provoke, I would really like to know.

k

If people thought Tilt was hard stuff, this is built out of the same ideas(vast expanses of abyss with just that voice to guide you through then short bursts of bellowing rupture) but far more offensive and aggressive and absurd than before.
On Tilt and Climate of Hunter and the Niteflites tracks there was at least some hint of the easy listening merchant of before, but twisted in a Lynchian way so that it became subverted in its new terrain, but here there is basically none of that, all transformed into noise rock, Penderaki like queasy stasis, and insane tableaux. Even on Tilt there was "The Patriot" and "Farmer in the City" lush songlike songs, albeit of a bizzaro hue.

Differences from Tilt--- less songy, more operatic, less heterogenous from song to song, the vocabulary remains the same across the album--- baritone guitars/atonal acoustic guitars, string dischords and Iannis Xenakis like glissandi, with lots of musique concrete/improv like disturbing sound effects- is that really a donkey braying or some kind of brass instrument on "Jolson and Jones"...? On Psioratic is that a giant pee rolling around?
Is that sawing of wood in the middle 8? There's far less tonal and chordal segments as well, rather stretches of effects and obscure instruments beating out regular rhythms...

Singing remarkably for a 63 yr old as effortlessly as ever- genuinely
impressive...sounds just as good vocally as 11 years ago...

The comments that it was his rockingest album are accurate, not to the extent that he uses lots of guitars or verse/chorus structures... rather that its aggressive and pounding in parts in a way that his stuff hasn't been in the past... but really it sounds like a single piece in movements, almost a diseased cabaret or an ultra-avant garde opera of modern cruelty. It immediately renders all Goth/Industrial as frightening as a care-bears
annual sing-along...

Its immense and incredibly truculent- a libretto/lyric sheet really feels ESSENTIAL in order to make any headway with some of the pieces... makes even plainer the idea that he's often singing in different characters within the same song, different angles on the thing described..some lyrics already stick out .... "anthrax Jesus, sack of feet", "nose holes caked in black cocaine..." "don't think it hasn't been fun, cos it hasn't..." "polish the fork and stick the fork in him", "waddles into the afternoon, look into its eyes, it will look into your eyes......", "and everything within reach."
And the little tv news sample at the beginning of Buzzers... "Caligula proclaimed his horse senator, but his horse never took his seat"

Some questions- what the fuck is that ducknoise thing on "The Escape" all about? Its completely obscene and absurd....
And on "A Lover Loves" what are the hissing noises for? What does it all mean? The end of the album leaves me completely puzzled and confused... it ends in a kind of terrifying absurdity. Actually the entirety of those last two songs is so jarring and fucked up. Can anyone help me along here??? This seems like properly new terrain for Walker, twisted absurdity as the last place to go after the cavalcade of horrors before or what exactly? It feels like one of the few albums I've heard where it requires serious discussion just to work out what the hell is going on! Just some basic thematics would be helpful (ie "Clara" and "Jesse" make a lot of sense
given that we know the former is about the death of Mussolini's mistress and the latter perhaps Elvis in conversation with his dead twin about the fall of American myth as represented by 9/11)

I think I agree. I'm getting tired of thinking about what it might be like. I don't want to ruin it for myself.

it's definitely a donkey, taken from a sound effects record. i have it on very good authority. ahem.

"Caligula proclaimed his horse senator, but his horse never took his seat"

i've listened to this 50 - 60 times, and i still have no idea what it means. the song is meant to juxtapose the reign of milosevic with the evolution of the horse. that's fine as a guiding principle, but i have no clue how to apply it. yet.

Some questions- what the fuck is that ducknoise thing on "The Escape" all about? Its completely obscene and absurd....

the song opens with a slide guitar, which is meant to call to mind the Warner Bros/Loony Tunes theme song. again, no idea how these fragments contributue to the overall meaning of the song. been working on it for a whiiiile now.

the last song might be my favorite on the record. it's definitely the most melodic, but also weird and halting because of all the "psst! psst!"

I liked it better pre-Internet, when albums just appeared...(like "Tilt", for instance)...very few things just come out of the blue anymore, and nothing ever lives up to the hype...

Agreed on the donkey business...

In context of the quote itself Milosevic is basically saying that a declaration means nothing, its the taking (the horse to the senate, bosnians taking control etc). Hmm... a difficult one.... and the evolution of the horse....?

The further the album goes on the more opaque its lyrical matter becomes...

all - sorry for spoiling the fun, i've just been dying to discuss some of this...