New Scott Walker album: 'The Drift'

it's not the unrelenting deathiness itself, as this is quite tolerable in a book which can be put down whenever, and with a film wheere the eyes can wander about the image. and i can happily play the ligeti requiem playing whilst tidying some papers, but having just one voice, that voice, enunciating it, is too much somehow.

How true. And also a little bit sad - I often feel uncomfortable with our current musical scene: with a couple of exceptions (one of these being Giovanni Ferretti), the cultural landscape tends to be quite grey and not really thought-provoking. And etherodox positions are generally banned.
(by the way, its funny to note that another great song about Pasolini was written by Coil).

Max - are you Italian? Musicista?

I've read lots of comments along the lines of how it's "more Tilt than Tilt". I'm not so sure. There's a lot more contrast on Tilt, more different musical and mood strategies at play. What The Drift seems to take as a template is The Cockfighter (as well as Lullabye, the track he wrote for Ute Lemper), but it doesn't much reflect the rest of Tilt to my ears. A lot of enduring Walker tropes are jettisoned here. One is the poignant moment of lush orchestral beauty at the edge of violence/horror (The Electrician, Bouncer See Bouncer). Another is the huge organ sound (Archangel, Fat Mama Kick, Manhattan). He hones down his vocabulary until he's left with menacing glissando, silences and huge crashing noises as his main tropes. Stretched out over a whole album I'm finding it a little hard to take at the moment. I'm also finding his voice a little more difficult to take. He used the swooning tenor to good effect on Tilt, in a way that really did betray terror and maybe a little madness. Here, it seems more controlled, more mannered, almost just another convention, like the honeyed baritone he's trying to escape. I guess it adds to the theatrical quality of the work. But I'm not really feeling the terror of 'I'm the only one left alone' for instance, because he sounds so mannered. He sounds a whole lot madder and more tormented on Manhattan or The Cockfighter, for instance. The lack of melody lines gets a touch wearing too, and it's a relief when he approaches something resembling melody. What he does with his voice reminds me of sung liturgy – and also of those interludes in operas between songs, where two protagonists are addressing each other, spoken dialogue forced into some sort of musical framework.

Anyway, I'm going to have to listen to it a lot more to properly get my head around it…

ps does the 'curare curare curare' refrain remind anyone else of Maria from West Side Story?

Listen to the drift while walking around at night. Initially its scary, then after awhile the combination of the sounds and physical experience of walking the dark streets becomes a more surreal experience, like a film, easy to detach yourself from.

P.S: Do not undertake this experiment if you live in a bad neighbourhood......or anywhere in America for that matter ! Just kidding...you Yanks are alright.

Listen to the drift while walking around at night. Initially its scary, then after awhile the combination of the sounds and physical experience of walking the dark streets becomes a more surreal experience, like a film, easy to detach yourself from.

P.S: Do not undertake this experiment if you live in a bad neighbourhood......or anywhere in America for that matter ! Just kidding...you Yanks are alright.

Marco, I'm a cross between Italian and Croatian = Istrian, but I actually do 'border-hopping' quite often between those two countries.
and yes, I am a musician, but a very latent one at the moment - just sorting psychological baggage out of the window and cleaning that rusty copper pipe attending to the flow, and practising patience (as is often the case).

I concur on the Italian music theme (although I must say I'm currently in awe of Italian house - see Milky's "Just The Way You Are")- although I think most post-C.P.I. artists fare good today (Marco Parente especially). I must say, though, it's since 2001 that I cannot say anything good in Ferretti's (or PGR's) favour. on the other hand, I enjoy Zamboni's album (and books) immensely..

I see you're also a Cope fan - I adore 'Jehovahkill' and am floored by 'Citizen Cained' (especially the two opening songs on either CK disc).

drop me an e-mail if you wish. btw, I hope 'The Drift' will be in my hands in a couple of days' time..

these titles sure make me think I was right never to bother really checkin out j cope

but if you like Scott Walker, you might just like those two albums, I think..

"Is it just me who sees it as a lost Goth album?"

No, I can see that, in terms of mood and sound. Reminds me a lot of Neubauten in general and Blixa's guitars for the Bad Seeds in particular. (Goth-by-association only, but let's not get into that.)

The use of cut-ups to evoke a sense of time and place made me think about how much I used to like Burroughs, and how effective they are in his less showy work.( 'Last Words of Dutch Schulz' for example.) Wild Bill's influence was everywhere in the Goth/industrial subculture of the 80's, of course.

On the other hand, I can also hear Harrison Birtwhistle's settings of Celan, and Tom Waits' eclectic use of instrumentation too, so there's an element of what you bring to it.

Interesting to hear Italian responses on 'Clara' - a good friend is both Italian and a fan, I'm just waiting to hear what she has to say.

"I'm a bit taken aback by how aggressive and just appalled this record seems to be."

Appalled is OTM. Made me think of how difficult it is for me to get all the way through a broadsheet paper these days. The record is easy by comparison.

Listening to that song again, I notice that that's not the only bit lifted from West Side Story in it -- hmmm.....

now that's beautiful.

MARK EDWARDS


SCOTT WALKER
The Drift
4AD CAD2603CD

Three stars? Of course not. Scott Walker doesn’t make three-star records. Those three stars are but a clumsy and mathematically inaccurate attempt to average out the five stars that a small elite of die-hard fans would happily slap on The Drift — five stars for having the nerve to keep making records so complex that we still haven’t got our heads round the last one, released in 1995 — and the complete absence of any stars at all, which would be the verdict of the larger group of people who can’t understand why he doesn’t sing proper songs. Great big slabs of noise. Followed by eerie silence. Then more noise. Then more silence. That’s The Drift. Unique and unfathomable, dense and despairing, this is music that everyone should hear, but many would find unlistenable. Three stars

xpost, i think it's pretty bad!

this is music that everyone should hear, but many would find unlistenable.

huh? in this day and age i can't think of any music that "everyone should hear" and if i did it wouldn't be an album i gave 3/5.

The word pretentious should be banned from criticism so people have to get at what they mean a little better.

is very OTM.

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.

Jess didnt delete that message with his mod powers. I think he's been hardened by those tool fans he mentions.

The album didn't chart in the UK Top 40 :(

I think "Great big slabs of noise. Followed by eerie silence. Then more noise. Then more silence. That’s The Drift. Unique and unfathomable, dense and despairing" is pretty clearly a reason why.

I kind of like that review actually. There is a sense in which the album is very hard to evaluate, because he has developed a fairly unique language which most of us only speak little phrases of. Thus it tends to split opinion into genius/awful, five star/one star camps. Neither of which are particularly useful. And I think the review gets at that quite nicely.

I know perfectly intelligent people who listen to a lot of music who find this album unlistenable. This does not mean they are philistines. Deal with it.

And that's fine, I don't mind, in fact I think that's part of the power.

Good old fashioned 4AD sleeve too! :)

Christ. If ever I need to bump off an ageing relative with a dicky heart to inherit their filthy lucre, I know which track I'm going to play them.

It's very soundtracky, this album. Even that Donald Duck moment feels like it comes from a horror movie where a woman alone in a house of a dark evening is confronted by a cartoon mask in the window... There are a lot of other movie moments too. The sound of footsteps at the end of one of the tracks is very film noir. The menacing strings are less Ligeti and Xenakis, and more Psycho and Jaws. And the whole album with its opaque lyric fragments feels a bit like watching a foreign-language movie where you know something horrible is happening but you don't quite know what it is because you're not understanding the dialogue, just picking up on the tone.

Mine too. First side in particular sounds bloody awful. I wasn't sure if it wasn't a bonfire crackling away in the background during "Clara".

Not that it really matters as I'm unlikely to play it again.

Interesting that Kinsella reviewed this since he seems to have aspired to use lyrics and extra-narrative sonic elements in his Joan of Arc records that Walker has utilized in a manner that is much more dramatic and effectively visceral.
I did like observations about the un-fixed character points of view and the comparing of Walker's process to that of a monk.

"It feels like The Drift is only a record by happenstance. It could just as well exist in any other medium—say, as a wall-size painting or a dense experimental film."

wtf?

It does many things in a 'samey' manner... But he also undermines the samey-ness of even that through the role that some of these 'block of sounds'* play so he achieves another consistency of being all over the place

OTFM!

wtf?

I don't see what's so wtf about it all. The point seems a clearer distilliation of an aspect of the record that critics have been trying to get at w/r/t its "language" being somewhat unique from its own medium.

I think for a lot of listeners the atmosphere of tension and eccentricity brings to mind works of art in other mediums as a mental reference point for comparison as opposed to merely other records. That seems to be why others have brought up the horror film and modernism comparisons, in describing the shock-effect of some of the hyperbolically dramatic sound effects and the degree of abstraction in the partially-narrative lyrics, respectively.