SCOTT WALKER
The Drift
4AD
· ’60s crooner post-rocks!
Genius or charlatan? We started asking ourselves this back in 1984, when this slightly eccentric ’60s crooner released Climate of Hunter, his long gestated vision of pop art song. The latter possibility was eventually discounted in 1995, when he gave us the bleak chamber music of Tilt, a far more sophisticated work than North America was ready for at the time, though it fit in snugly with what many in the U.K. were doing – Tindersticks, David Sylvian, The Bathers, etc.
But the genius part remains to be proved. Another decade has gone by and, after a teaser on the Pola X soundtrack, here’s the new one – essentially The Drift is Tilt with the melancholy strings replaced by anguished electric guitar sound masses and metallic percussion. Inevitably, Sylvian remains a reference point, his recent work with Derek Bailey much gentler than The Drift’s restrained violence, but clearly on the same wavelength.
I can see the album having a much broader appeal among the young than either Tilt or Blemish, though probably (and as usual) for all the wrong reasons. There is something in today’s counter-culture that seems resistant to any originality and can only accept it once it has forced itself into familiar shapes and signs. As a former industry-manufactured pop icon (the Sinatra for teens of the time), Walker is already halfway there, and as his music uses more widely accepted textures (albeit in unconventional structures), it is easy to explain him as just another of those "this meets that" chimeras that characterize post-modern popular culture.
But his essence lies elsewhere, in the struggle of a man intelligent enough to recognize how far he fell short of his potential, and willing to reject fame and spend 30 years in the wilderness to find his own voice. And his own voice is the centre of his music – while Meredith Monk, Sidsel Endresen, and Diamanda Galas have also put the sensuality of raw and extreme vocalization ahead of text, rhythm and melody, I cannot think of another male vocalist who has done so.
So, of course The Drift has its flaws – a certain monotony of execution and some lines that would have been barely tolerable from a high school poet – but there is also an epic dimension to the simple fact of it being here. This may not be genius, but it’s not The Arctic Monkeys either.
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