Scott Listfield
Visceral Artifice
The Art Colfax Classics Legendarium
Going OutSide The Box
katrina s. deponte
bottle up and explode
dracula horse
Shadow Shadow
drawing a pikachu maybe
e2-e4
Following:
The Art Colfax Classics Legendarium
Going OutSide The Box
katrina s. deponte
bottle up and explode
dracula horse
Shadow Shadow
drawing a pikachu maybe
e2-e4
The Drift by Scott Walker
Welly well well, anyone who knows me knows I never shut up about Scott Walker, but I seldom get to explain just what the fuck it IS I’m talking about and so, I think I’ll kickstart this here blog with a review and more of “The Drift” (2006) [and since the URL of this tumblr takes it’s title from lyrics on said album, this seems appropriate]
With an arm across the torso
Face on the nails
With an arm across the torso
Face on the pale, monkey nails
Scott Walker is, for better or worse, one of the most daunting and impenetrable artists of all time. This was no love at first sight syndrome for me, ladies and gents, it was a long road from the super-slick MOR string arrangements of his 60’s output up til The Drift, which, as we’ll see, is as off-putting as the 60’s work.
Most people get off of the ride after hearing the 60’s stuff, they just can’t quite stomach those string arrangements. But to those of you who feel this way, I ask you this, when you’re a greek god (Orpheus? He writes a song about him) and you’re perched on top of Olympus addressing humanity as it drunkenly fucks and dances itself into oblivion under an avalanche of time and futility, just what kind of musical accompaniment do you require? The Stooges won’t really work cause that’s as base and human as the drunken dance fucking already going on. Brian Eno will put people to sleep or describe their dream states in general but…I mean, I could keep going, but what’s the point? Nothing other than God’s string section really fits the bill, so, if you can pick yourself up, comb your hair, be somebody for a minute, and listen to what he’s saying, you might start to see where this rabbit hole leads…and that’s all I really have to say about that.
Scott is forever a classicist and as the 20th century has been deteriorating into a post-modern liberal academic free-for-all where “everything is true”, the distance (artistically and chronologically) between his albums has grown exponentially. The Drift was made 11 years after his last album, Tilt, in the 90’s. 11 years people. ELEVEN. YEARS. It’s paltry to call the man lazy cause this album, friends, is on par with very few things in this world or the next…perhaps the iceberg that sunk the titanic?
This album, 10 tracks, 10 bloody nails pounded into the coffin that houses the 20th century, is arguably the most horrific, violent, maddening work of art I’ve ever experienced. When I first heard this album after buying it from the record store I worked at in late 2006 I stopped it halfway through the second song and STRONGLY considered destroying it. I hesitate to say I wanted to break it, because this album so imbued with some magical force of terror that simply breaking a cd in half would not have worked, it needed some sort of ritual destruction, surely the blood of virgins would be required somehow. This album is absolute, meticulous evil, crafted with no less precision than Jack the Ripper or the Marquis de Sade once employed.
Touching on subjects that range from the public execution of Benito Mussolini to Elvis Presley talking to his dead still-born twin brother Jesse when he was strung out on cocaine, which Walker uses as a metaphor for 9/11, this is HEAVY shit, and in the hands of a lesser charlatan the weight of the pretension of this subject matter could completely crumble and fall into ruins. But after heavy listening (bear in mind, I am reviewing this album five years after it’s release, it demands that kind of scrutiny before anything will reveal itself) it becomes quite clear that Scott Walker is indeed the stable-master of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse.
That’s not to say that the guy’s without a sense of humor, in the opening song “Cossacks Are”, which is probably the closest he comes to a genuine “song” type song, and sort of sets the stage for this doomsday elegy that’s about to unfold, he sings, “You could easily picture this in the current top ten…” That’s funny, right? Well, yeah, but in a Francis Bacon sort of way. The song gives you enough time to put on your seat-belt and get a quick re-cap of what Scott’s been observing while we were listening to Animal Collective and putting bumper-stickers on our car condemning “W”.
The lyrics, written with painstaking immediacy despite its eleven year gestation period, are written as a forlorn, futile, damning, and violent eulogy for humanity, written no doubt in the blood of murderers and children, saints and sadists alike. Innocuous lyrics like, “The chair had moved ever so slightly”, suddenly become the most terrifying thing to experience in the world. Nevermind the obviously terrifying lines like “Polish the fork, and stick the fork in him”, and “Look into it’s eyes. It will look into yours”
The music itself isn’t entirely without precedent (although I don’t know of any albums that use a man punching slabs of raw meat as percussion), Ligetti and lots of other avant-garde composers have occasionally tread these paths, as well as electronic avant-garde artists like Fennesz, but, ultimately, the attention isn’t particularly focused on the means itself. All of these atonal awful cacophonies have one of the few things going for them that I usually desire from almost any sort of music, purpose. This album, more than anything, is a lament for the loss of purpose.
That’s not to say that this album is all full volume atonal noises from start to finish. There are quiet, starkly quiet moments, some of the quietest I’ve ever heard on a recording. The final track, “A Lover Loves” traces a simple two-note guitar line on acoustic guitar while Scott Walker croons about a “waltz for a dodo” and a “samba for bambi”. What makes this album literally make you want to jump out of your skin, apart from Scott’s macabre musings, is that the dynamics on this album are so unpredictable that the quiet moments give way to the loudest most earth-shattering “blocks of sound” (as Scott calls it in the documentary 30 Century Man) that you could ever experience. ”Raw Power” is probably louder decibel wise overall, but the ebb and flow of the dynamics on this album enrich polar extremes to such a degree that nothing seems as quiet as quiet moments and nothing in heaven or hell could ever be quite as loud as the loud moments on this album
I could probably go on, but I doubt anyone’s read this far anyways, so I’ll cut it short. I will finish with this, though. I can’t particularly say I recommend this album to anyone, nothing about it is easy, there are no particular grooves or catchy moments, and it is entirely removed from anything that is going on in music in this century or the last. No my friends, we shan’t see the likes of this record ever again, and jesus, how could you stand anything else that is remotely close to this magnitude. This is straight up biblical music, fire and brimstone. If you have a weak stomach, then by all means, don’t bother. There is a fair amount of pretension, but, in pitchfork’s review of this album, they do a pretty decent job of explaining that pretension isn’t necessarily synonymous with bullshit, and, when you happen to be humanity’s bloodily coronated doomsday crooner, it isn’t.
