The Drift Scott Walker

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CD

  • Release Date: 06/06/2006
  • Sales Rank: 27,582
  • Label: 4AD / ADA
  • UPC: 652637260328

Listener Rating: (1 ratings)

Detailed Rating: "Authenticity" See All

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  • Overview
  • Tracks
  • Editorial Reviews
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Track List
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The Drift

1LISTENCossacks Are 4:31
2LISTENClara 12:43
3LISTENJesse 6:28
4LISTENJolson and Jones 7:45
5LISTENCue 10:27
6LISTENHand Me Ups 5:49
7LISTENBuzzers 6:39
8LISTENPsoriatic 5:51
9LISTENThe Escape 5:18
10LISTENA Lover Loves 3:13

About this Artist

Editorial Reviews

There were intermittent soundtrack and score contributions of varying magnitudes, as well as a couple other low-key projects, but The Drift is Scott Walker's proper follow-up to 1995's Tilt, an album that also happened to trail its predecessor by 11 years. If 1984's Climate of Hunter put the MOR in morose, Tilt avoided the road completely and went straight toward the fractured, fraught images inside Walker's nightmares. It was entirely removed from anything that could've been classified as contemporary. The Drift isn't an equally severe leap from Tilt, but it is darker, less arranged, alternately more and less dense, and ultimately more frightening. Maybe it'll make your body temperature drop a few degrees. Working with what Walker has referred to as "blocks of sound," only a few of the album's 68 minutes have any connection to rock music, and many of those minutes are part of a harrowing 9/11 song that also obliquely references "Jailhouse Rock" as Elvis Presley cries out ("I'm the only one left alive!") to his stillborn twin brother. The songs swing from hovering drones to crushing jolts. The blocks that make them, then, differ tremendously in weight, from one that could be pushed by an index finger to one that could only be hauled by a forklift. Whenever a vast shaft of space opens up, it is eventually stuffed with drastic, horrific dissonance. While a song might contain a constant element or two, they're all in a constant state of unease and flux. Walker's voice matches the activity levels of the sounds, providing a kind of paranoid croon one minute and then, during another, casting almost demonic projections that are nearly as rattling as the accompaniment. From the outset, the album seems impossibly insular and impenetrable, especially if you've been led to believe that Scott Walker's name is synonymous with recluse, but it has everything to do with real lives (or, more accurately, real deaths). Walker is acutely aware of what's going on with the world outside his supposed candle-lit bunker; he's only finding very unique (OK, bloody minded) ways to bring them up. Any mystique behind the recordings is laid to waste by one scene from a documentary, titled 30 Century Man, which shows Walker -- a baseball hat-wearing sixty-something man from Ohio -- instructing another man on how to thump a slab of meat. It looks and sounds absurd, of course (the participants seem to be aware of this), but then again, the results are used in a song inspired by the public executions of Benito Mussolini and his mistress. Broken spells aside, how much more bleak could this album be? None more bleak. Andy Kellman, All Music Guide



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Customer Reviews

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  • Ratings: 1Reviews: 1

Scott Walker Boldly Goes Where No Listener Has Gone Before-- into the 30th Centuryby MissClawdy

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July 26, 2009: Catch my drift? Drifting off-drifting away-drifter-veering off-center-roaming aimlessly-what drifts through your brain-

Research Scott Walker before tackling The High Priest of Wyrd's challenging, fascinating stunner. It's not music for a sunny day. You won't be listening to it on your MP3 player while you work out at the gym. It's a love/hate dichotomy: impressionistic, rarely melodic; clustered, tense instrumentation and SFX make you jump out of your skin a few times. He's the master of the shocking opener, and you'll search for a refrain that doesn't scare you. Did I like it? Did I not like it? Let me listen to it again--in a few days. One track at a time.

The record demands/shatters concentration, repels/hypnotizes. Hymns, dirges, Arabic strains, bizarre symphonic movements; language ellipsing into code, anxious climbs, precipitous drops? you never know where each piece is heading. A roller-coaster. A brain-wreck. A a magpie collage: poetic slivers, nightmares, hallucinations, declarations, non sequiturs, sly jokes; evocative, disjointed, cinematic, vivid, panoramic macrocosmic imagery and microcosmic magnified instants. 180? contrasts: pagan/religious imagery; sacred/profane. Scott's a painter, BTW.

The Drift is a bottomless well: more listening, more discoveries, more associations. A Voice sings/chants/intones from the bottom of the well, drifting up to consciousness (ours). Not a person? a Voice crying in the Wilderness, as in "Jesse": "I'm the only one left alive!" Walker's Brechtian delivery is unearthly, emotionless, yet pure, devastating emotion (you might cry); a querulous, mournful, unresolved tenor, not his natural baritone. It's Not-Scott: a Narrator who can use clinical enunciation to dissociate from graphic content. It's a futuristic opera/Greek tragedy/Gregorian chant hybrid, a demented prayer by Genet and Artaud.

His sonic map is boobytrapped: sudden stops, stark silences, Psycho attacks, sound grenades (screaming voices, descending strings, or both?). Apocalyptic ("You and me against the world", "world about to end"), spooky ("It will look into your eyes"), harrowing, concealing esoteric references, buried jokes. In "Cossacks Are" is the hilarious: "You could easily picture this in the current top ten." "Psoriatic" contains the ultimate Scott Walker T-shirt slogan: "Don't think it hasn't been fun, 'cause it hasn't." He seems to enjoy spooking us and seeing what he can get away with if it's done with solemnity.

The P.O.V. in "Clara" is that of a frightened child? contrasted with an intimate, tender, metaphoric moment about releasing a swallow trapped in a room. The ordinary becomes extraordinary: "Good afternoon. It's a lovely afternoon" from "Jolson and Jones" carries a menacing undertone. I found a danse macabre element: I waltzed to "Cue," did the Electric Slide to "Hand Me Ups." More modern dance companies should use Scott's work!

I had a visceral reaction to the ending; if Walker intended this result, I want to smack him and laugh at the same time. "A Lover Loves" has a droning cadence peppered with a nagging "Psst psst psst psst;" you drift away, accepting this weird ride that never arrives anywhere? then he pulls the plug, shocks you out of dreamland: "SCAT!"

I yelled, "That's the ending?? Why did you do that??" (And I swore.) Such a disturbing way to close an album! Is this his way of saying "Stay tuned"? I sure will. Don't have a choice.