New Scott Walker album: 'The Drift'

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.

Perhaps he was, but by now (as you infer, Marcello), I think the expectations have changed — I know they have for me. In this instance, it would have been more out of left field if Scott produced a straight-ahead pop album.

joa has also covered walker.

As a Walker novice, though I find it irritating because I bet there's other stuff of his I'd like more than this and of course I haven't a clue where to start.

http://www.nymag.com/nymag/critics/pop/16844/

Scott Walker
"The Drift"
(4AD)

Scott Walker has a voice made for drama: a long-breathed baritone with a cultivated vibrato that sounds both virile and ghostly. It made him a pop star when he proclaimed a monumentally orchestrated despair in the 1966 Walker Brothers hit "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." He moved from Los Angeles to London, where the Walker Brothers — not his brothers and not his last name, Engel — became pop idols for a few years. There he embarked on his own increasingly idiosyncratic songwriting career: from pop-rock to singing Jacques Brel to what can only, and incompletely, be called art songs.

"The Drift" is his first album since "Tilt" in 1995, and like "Tilt" it's remote from anything usually called rock or pop. The electric guitar and drumbeat disappear midway through the first song, "Cossacks Are," and rarely return. Most of the songs are slow, yet utterly devoid of the comfort of ballads. Dissonant orchestral strings appear and disappear, swelling or muttering or shivering high overhead. Lone instruments, like a fluegelhorn or a slide guitar, loom up out of silence. Electronic sounds lurk in dim recesses.

Amid them Mr. Walker croons grim, cryptic tidings: visions of death, mutilation, sorrow and destruction. "Jesse," which he has described as his song about 9/11, is also about Elvis Presley's stillborn twin; it starts with a barely recognizable hint of "Jailhouse Rock" and ends with Mr. Walker singing, completely unaccompanied, "I'm the only one left alive."

In "Hand Me Ups" he imagines how it feels to be crucified; the backup includes an Arabic-inflected voice, a giant bass saxophone called a tubax, a screaming woman and, when he sings, "Its audience is waiting," a lone rhythmic handclap. When he contemplates murder in "Jolson and Jones," he turns the word "curare" into something like a refrain.

If Mr. Walker has any rock counterpart, it would be the Trent Reznor who made Nine Inch Nails' "Fragile"; Mr. Walker wants his complex studio textures "played at high volume," say the liner notes. But his songs are equally close to the somber desolation of Schubert lieder like "Die Winterreise," and in their oblique way are informed as much by history and politics as by private reflections.

"The Drift" sets out only to follow its own obsessions; it's both lush and austere, utterly personal and often Delphic in its impenetrability. Mr. Walker clearly set out to please no one but himself, but his threnodies are as compelling as they are disquieting. JON PARELES

Start with Scott 2. "Jackie," "Plastic Palace People," "The Girls and the Dogs," etc.--while maybe somewhat AL Webber-ish compared to Climate of Hunter, Tilt, and The Drift--are great gateway songs

I have been thinking about this. I presumed it was Donald Duck but I couldn't square the link between Donald Duck (Walt Disney) and Bugs Bunny's "What's Up Doc" (Warner Bros.) ... Maybe it is Daffy

This part still puzzles me, I haven't yet read a convincing explanation and I am still intrigued by the similarity to Lucio Fulci's New York Ripper (making 'that sound' a signifier of terror) even though I doubt there is any link.

"I was trying to get something matching up to the lyric at the end there, because you know he’s not saying what Donald Duck says, he’s saying what Bugs Bunny says, so you have a kind of combination of two creatures together. They're kind of morphing into each other. I guess that was what was running through my head."

http://tigersare.blogspot.com/2006/05/scott-walker-speaks.html

Doesn't really make it any clearer as to what The Escape is all about. I don't think it's anything to do with Donald Rumsfeld though, as someone posits upthread.

I guess that clears up the facts (if not the meaning)
Morphing two popular cartoon characters, regardless of their 'brand'.
The WB vs. Disney thing was reading a little too much into it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYWGQMqC74

http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0022#entry1

they are the same pressing as the vinyl is import only. this forum is the only place i've seen anyone complain, though obviously us copies have only been on sale for a day.

seems sort of strange to me that the 4ad site would be selling promos?!?

My first impression on an initial listen (in full) I can only descibe as colossal, flattening disbelief and awe :-O

Hard to find around here. Not exactly "Walmart" material. Really enjoyed this thread. When I get it, I'll sit in the bathtub late at night with a glass of wine for the first listen on the boombox, then give general impressions here the next a.m.

So, after a few listens, what are your reactions? Does the first half overshadow the second half? I saw that in a few reviews. Who will do a track by track summary? :)

Cheers

The daffy/donald duck part is just plain ridiculous - really the lowest point of the whole affair and the point at which my suspicions were confirmed that the emperor wears no clothes on this one.

I don't find it over-pretentious though, that's what stunned me on a first listen, how utterly coherent the whole sound frontier & the vocals/words became. Wierd for weirds sake (or at least the perception of it, however wrong that impression or first taste is) usually turns me right off I have to say. I can't stand most Xui Xui I've heard and am still fence-sitting on Animal Collective til I hear more that convinces me. I know where you're coming from with the confounding = cred points thing, but hmmm, it's worked for me so far more like a rock record than anything SO obtuse (I guess I'd concur with what Raw Patrick said upthread, it has accessibility IMO). I'd like to say I have very broad, adventurous tastes is music... but I think I'm actually a pretty conservative listener all told.

The Donald Duck part is terrifying (in context) though! Actually, when I did go back I stopped before track 9 because I just couldn't face it again so soon :-O

I'd agree there are spots where the achievements are thinner or become less satisfactory, and it takes some commitment to hear through as an album whole. But "Clara"! That track alone seems the most fully-formed single song embodiment of the aims of "The Drift"