In a sense, your reviewer’s on a hiding to nothing writing about SCOTT WALKER. After all, were his cards to be tipped onto the table, he’d probably go with Scott’s immaculate first four solo albums as the ultimate items in ‘rock’s back catalogue and concur with Jarvis Cocker’s decree of their creator as the greatest living artist of the 20th Century.
Thing is, by its’ very epithet, such a term suggests a monolithic creative sun which has since dimmed, but in the reclusive Noel Scott Engel’s case, that’s not strictly true, is it? Admittedly, planet Scott is only occasionally viewed on the edge of Pop’s solar system these days and his more ‘recent’ back catalogue featuring (including “The Drift”) three new albums in twenty-two years is the kind of strike rate that makes The Blue Nile look like Guided By Voices, but hell, he’s supposed to be a recluse isn’t he? Besides, when you add this sporadic activity to curating 2003’s Meltdown, producing Pulp’s “We Love Life” (2002) and recording the instrumental score for the 1999 film “Pola X” all of a sudden a rounder picture appears of a character still struck pretty regularly by inspiration and a desire to get involved this side of the Millennium.
More pertinently, which other 63-year old ‘living legend’ out there would dare to make music so strange, haunting and sometimes impenetrable as Scott Walker still does? Yes, there are a few other credible survivors from the 1960s, but much as I love the likes of Neil Young and David Bowie, even these amazing figures have a tendency to revisit past glories these days. Possibly a closer comparison (if Walker can really be compared) would be someone like Kate Bush - herself recently returned from lengthy exile with the fascinating “Aerial” – but even that doesn’t quite get there, does it?
It’s tempting to view “The Drift” as the third part of Scott’s black, avant-garde trilogy that began with “Climate Of Hunter” in 1984 and continued with 1995’s truly bizarre “Tilt”, but then Walker has been showing signs of shoving the envelope as hard as possible way back since he was covering Jacques Brel songs in 1967 and if you think back to tracks like “Boy Child” and the remarkable “The Electrician”, he’s been gradually sloughing off the recognisable ‘pop’ shell for many years now, so the reality is probably closer to Scott simply writing and recording the songs he wanted to as and when the urge moved him and little else. The fact that there’s been 11 years between each of these last three may well be purely coincidental.
So with the surmising and supposition out of the way, what does the reality of “The Drift” hold in store for us? Well, by Scott’s exacting standards, it opens with the album’s most recognisable ‘pop’ moment of sorts in “Cossacks Are.” Not that it’s exactly Top 40 fare of course with the drums stumbling and the guitar and bass apparently completely unaware of each other, but Scott’s deeper-but-still-recognisable vocals can’t fail to command as ever and while I haven’t got a clue what he’s blethering about without the aid of sleevenotes (sample lyric: “with an arm across the torso, face on the pale monkey names”) the whole caboodle sounds bloody compelling from where I’m sitting, for sure.
Besides, it’s hugely approachable when compared with the 12-minute plus epic called “Clara” which follows on. Opening with what sounds like the hum of electronic crickets or bats, it continues as Scott and an un-named female voice whisper the word “birds”. After that, the drums roll in a ritualistic manner and there’s another instrument I can’t place - possibly a Crummhorn or something equally esoteric - before there’s an orchestral explosion in the manner of The Young Gods (their remarkable track “La Fille De La Morte” from the “L’Eau Rouge” album is one of the few contemporary-ish reference points outside Classical music) takes place and then Scott takes it down again and the song goes into a very cinematic section (based, I think, on the relationship between Musselini and his mistress Clara Pitacci) where he sings “she knows this room, she can navigate it” and goes on to describe a scene that’s all Palazzos, moonlight and intruders. There’s far more of course, and when the song finishes with Scott narrating a story about finding a swallow trapped in his room and releasing it, you’re mystified, but completely captivated.
The album continues on, leaving questions and selling dummies, but rarely coming to any kind of recognisable conclusions. “Jesse” sounds like a distant Eastern European relation of “The Electrician” in terms of atmosphere with the strings gradually tautening and swelling and a guitar making an occasional twangle, but it’s not half as weird as “Jolson And Jones”: a curious, cut-up thing making reference to Al Jolson (“Sonny Boy”) and possibly Jack Jones? I’m guessing about this latter, though Scott always was a fan. The music is genuinely eerie and nightmarish with orchestral creaks and groans and Walker singing of strange nocturnal manoeuvres (“the prints of my fingers dusted from door knobs”) as the sound of descending footsteps starts up and continues on to the end. Bloody hell: don’t go down to the basement Scott!!
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We reach the centre of the album with “Cue”, which pretty much single-handedly re-writes the term ‘filmic’. Its’ brooding landscape, though, is every bit as unforgiving as something from “Blade Runner” or “The Omega Man”, however it and continues on through several patches of John Cage-style silence and another deafening, Young Gods-style explosion around the 5-minute mark. Just briefly there’s a glimpse or two of the old, recognisable Scott in here too, but it’s snatched away almost as soon as it’s begun.
The second half of the album is every bit as challenging. “Hand Me Ups” features mad orchestral flourishes and rushing drums competing with a Muezzin wail of backing vocals and incongruous dubby basslines poking through the skein. It’s very theatrical, though the truly macabre lyrics (“The pee-pee soaked trousers, the torn muddied dress”) sound more like the sort of thing Throbbing Gristle might once have employed. It’s barely more mystifying than the ensuing “Buzzers”, though, which see-saws between extreme minimalism, radio snippets (Caligula and Milosevic, anyone?) and a final orchestral thrust.
We’re approaching an uneasy final strait now with “Psoriatic”. This time out, the dubby bass playing makes a courageous, but largely superfluous return and part of the ‘drum’ track sounds uncannily like someone repeatedly banging a spanner on a pipe. Hmm. The sections repeat, though, and the more you work at it, some structure does gradually appear. The track eventually falls away to the sound of what could be, but probably isn’t, a Berlin S-Bahn train rumbling. Answers on a postcard, please.
Penultimate track “The Escape” – against some stiff opposition – probably takes the blue riband for the most esoteric offering of all here. The opening sequence is quite pretty, although it sounds like it’s set at about 3AM (like much of the album) and finds Scott (implausibly) singing “I wish I was in Dixie”. That’s all grand, but I’m not sure if the Lovecraftian monster which apparently guests on backing vocals in the track’s latter stages has been officially union sanctioned. This part of the song is truly arcane and definitely not for the faint-hearted.
When I tell you the album culminates with Scott and an acoustic guitar for “A Lover Loves” you might have visions of tracks like “30 Century Man”, but even here he’s minimal and truly oblique and that repeated “Psst! Psst!” bit will probably alienate even some who have got this far. It’s a truly eerie postscript to a record that is going to stimulate a whole lotta confusion whichever way you slice it.
But then what did you really expect? As Ian Penman’s notes suggest, it would have been easy for Scott to simply succumb to the nostalgia that could surround him if he so desired, but that’s never been his style and he’s not going to start at this stage of the game. Thus, “The Drift” is brave, bold, sometimes pretentious and at times downright scary, but it’s still the sound of a living legend going out on a limb in the pursuit of the artistic gains he feels are to be strived for and surely even in this selfish world it doesn’t get much cooler than that.
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