New Scott Walker album: 'The Drift'

1st track of Walker was surprisingly pleasant and rocking. I am playing computer games to it.

OK, I have listened to this now and it’s much less abstruse and hard to approach than the thread above had led me to believe... I thought maybe it'd be a chore to get through and after I'd managed I'd not like it and think that I was missing something or that it was my fault. It's comparatively POP compared to what I'd expected and an easier listen than Tilt.

It sounds to me like a horror film soundtrack (1976-1983) mixed with the more rocking end of post-rock and sometimes even bits of the first two Black Sabbath albums (I even thought I heard him mention black masses but I think that was wishful thinking as I can’t see it in the lyrics) (obv. horror soundtracks and this both draw on modernist string composition.) I could even imagine some band on Relapse Records or some of the black metallers that went ambient ending up sounding like this, just from a completely different direction. I mean Walker does like Nine Inch Nails and Mogwai.

It’s got a lot of forward motion and rock energy for a something titled “the Drift”.

I thought the lyric fragments in the thread above were pretty weak but they're much funnier on record and, I'm guessing, deliberately so—-no-one would really write a song about Elvis' twin or use "like what happened in America" as a refrain w/out tongue in cheek these days would they?

Also, “WHAT’S UP DOC?” And the donkey is FUCKING GREAT.

When Scott sings "A man came up toward the body/and poked it with a stick" I think of Crispin Glover in Rivers Edge.

There should be an instrumental version of this record.

I think that this might work as sex music. That’s probably why I’m getting none.

It’s really fucking good.

Ironically, the vocals seem almost inconsequential compared to the incredible depth of the production. The best recorded album I have ever heard.

Jonesey get your hi-fi out.

Blow me a birthday kiss when rewiring starts, remmeber!

My friend's dad had a flash hi-fi when we were kids and he told my friend's younger sibling that if they touched his speakers they'd get electric shocks, one time "demonstrating" this by touching them himself and twitching and screaming a bit and then falling to the floor. Surprisingly my friend's little sister isn't in care or anything.

I've still got a few bits and pieces to put in, but hopefully the article will be up on CoM by the end of this week.

To put it very, very mildly, the record has shaken me to my core.

xpost TIMING!

First thoughts: a lot of it feels like Opera! As in Benjamin Britten operas (first time i'd noticed that Scott's voice isn't a million miles away from Peter Pears').

The meat punching is really really unnerving. I think it's the arrhythmic nature of it - it sounds like beats but it's out of synch with the actual 'beat' of the music. The same goes, to a slightly lesser extent, for the looped walking down the stairs sound effect.

I liked the Eno-esque "inventing new instruments" aspects - could have done with even more of this actually. And a bit more variety in general too: some of the tracks in the second half appeared to repeat tricks I'd heard in the first. But this is only a minor quibble - it's probably better to listen to each song on its own rather than all in one go anyway.

Also he gets his facts wrong. There was no Walker Brothers reunion in 1970, Climate Of Hunter does not "remain out of print", Tilt does not feature "Walker chanting random numbers over the sound of a chain being pulled", the Drift doesn't feature an "ancient tuba", etc., etc.

http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=11759

By "ancient tuba" maybe he means the tubax, which Scott talks about in interviews. Except it's not a tuba, ancient or otherwise, it's a type of saxophone.

x-post

Yeah, as for The Electrician "cruising down frozen autobahns of synthesizer", the most predominant thing about the song is that it's orchestral!

and much as i love scott, the whiff of pretension does hang round, though rarely envelops

i'd rather read something that acknowledges that than breathless hyperbole/if-you-don't-appreciate-the-genius-you're-stupid stuff

It's Raining Today: The Scott Walker Story (1967-1970) [Razor & Tie, 1996]
Nothing I'd read about this L.A. wannabe turned moody Brit teenthrob--going back to Nik Cohn's Rock From the Beginning, which pegged him as "top-heavy and maudlin" in 1968--prepared me for how purely godawful he'd be. We're talking Anthony Newley without the voice muscles, "MacArthur Park" as light-programme boilerplate, a male Vera Lynn for late bloomers who found Paul McCartney too r&b. Go ahead, believe Nick Cave, Oasis, Foetus, and, I cannot tell a lie, compiler Marshall Crenshaw. But I'm warning you--when I gave him the benefit of the doubt, all I got was this lousy review. C-

I think he's wrong, but he's hardly anti-intellectual. Ultimately Christgau's aesthetic is about directness, rhythm, communication with the audience. Pretty much the opposite of everything Scott Walker stands for.

The boilerplate comeback of the intellectual for, like, ever. Weak.

yes, jerry the nipper, i know that side of him and it's always been annoying... however, i don't think there's much to it in the end

and let's just say that, um, english/european critics are hardly immune to reductive stereotypes about america...

i like a good transatlantic mudfest, myself

on the flip side, these stereotypes are getting at something real, however clumsily

anyway

Not so, you stetson-wearing, loud-mouthed moron.

It just seems odd that Jess should pick on the records "pretensions" as being "European" - as if there aren't loads of avant-noise US composers.

But let's let it go :)

I have no idea he said, or what you're talking about. And immediately switching the debate over to personal gripes is dirty fighting.

Come on, you're just a couple of posts away from putting your first through the screen, aren't you?

Jerry, it probably relates to the fact that Scott Walker is an American who has lived in Europes for decades and been explicity influenced by Europe's high modernist art.

xpost yes

Most sad songs are sad over things that can be cured with a hug, a few kind words, or some chocolate.

Words fail!

(The review, meanwhile, strikes me as a perfectly sound way, both humorous and serious, to talk about The Drift for an audience that is interested in music but probably almost totally unfamiliar with his work -- in otherwards, exactly the expected audience of the City Paper readership.)

People need to chill the fuck out. Jess's review was rock solid.

this is a comeback? or a non sequitir?

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/reviews/scott-walker/the-drift.htm