Scott Walker - to those who know and love his music - is one of those towering figures of American culture that is as much the stuff of legend as an actual person, like Roky Erickson or Thomas Pynchon. Walker spent the late '60s recording four astonishing LPs of lush, overwrought continental melodrama, entitled Scott through Scott 4. These are great records that retain their gorgeousness today, and have shaped the musical landscape in which artists like Nick Cave exist (also Neko Case, recently discovered by hipsters, who covered Walker's song "Duchess" on her first album). Walker was mostly unheard from for the next twenty years, but in 1995 he released Tilt, a bleak monolith of darkness and anguish that had little in common with the ornate ballads he sang in the 1960's.
Here we are in 2006 and Walker has released The Drift, which is just about the most horrifying, nightmarish album I have ever heard in my life. The operative word here is dense. These songs are absolutely clotted with bizarre percussion, rumbling sound effects, and shrieks of squalling dissonance. Soaring over this rattling, mechanical landscape of terror is Walker's instantly recognizable croon; only now he doesn't really sing melodies so much as gently intone his fragmented, abstract lyrics, which are more disturbing than ever, boasting such subject matter as the execution of Benito Mussolini and Elvis Presley's stillborn twin brother. Sometimes it's almost impossible to believe this is the same man who wrote songs like "The World's Strongest Man" and "It's Raining Today."
Words really don't do justice to this kind of aural experience. You'll feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you hear the shuffling footsteps that punctuate "Jolson and Jones." When Walker sweetly sings about "pee pee soaked trousers" on "Hand Me Ups", you won't know whether the right response is nervous laughter or hysterical sobbing. And his vocal contortions on "The Escape" might make you soak your own trousers. The album closes with gently atonal acoustic guitar and Walker hissing psst at you like he's trying to get your attention at the opera.
The Drift is the kind of album I can recommend to virtually no one, not because it's bad but because those receptive to this kind of thing probably already know about it. This is audio grand guignol in the same vein as Diamanda Galas at her most blistering, and it will most certainly be unpleasant and jarring for most listeners. However, it's as bold and effective an artistic statement as anything coming out today, even if it is such an exhausting experience that I can't really imagine putting it on much more than a few times a year.
