The Drift (4Ad)

24 CHICAGO READER | MAY 12, 2006 | SECTION ONE Reviews Music Movies Theater Books The new Don DeLillo’s Tony Millionaire’s Scott 28 Love-Lies-Bleeding Billy a Hazelnuts Walker REVIEW BY album MILES RAYMER REVIEW BY REVIEW BY TIM KINSELLA Daniel Clowes TONY ADLER and Terry Zwigoff’s 32 a Art School a 24 New books on Confidential 30 corruption, Rush Limbaugh, REVIEW BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM a and the press corps Music SCOTT WALKER THE DRIFT (4AD) Great Scott Cult hero Scott Walker releases the weirdest record of his career. By Tim Kinsella n 1967, when Scott Walker which he’s most widely revered was 24, he quit his band the today—after a decent fifth album I Walker Brothers at the height in 1970, he released four more of their fame—on their final tour without any original material at the supporting acts were Cat all, including two forgettable Stevens, Engelbert Humperdinck, country-flavored discs. By the and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. time he reunited with the Walker Walker had always seemed uneasy Brothers for a few years in the with his role as a teen idol, and by late 70s, his chart career was on tearing himself away from his the wane, and since then he’s adoring public to pursue an interi- been putting out solo records at a or vision, he became a textbook rate of one per decade: Climate of example of the existential rock star. Hunter in 1983, Tilt in 1995, and He released four self-titled now The Drift , scheduled to come solo albums between 1967 and out later this month on 4AD. 1969, immediately gravitating to The new album is the product material deeper and darker than of seven years’ work. The BBC anything he’d been allowed to recently broadcast Walker’s first sing before. He began with TV interview in more than a English versions of Jacques Brel decade, playing studio footage tunes, and for Scott 4 wrote all where he’s showing musicians his own songs. When you first exactly how to bang a metal pipe hear those records, his rich bari- or slap a side of raw pork to get tone, couched in pristine, lay- just the right percussion sound. ered orchestral arrangements, The Drift is unmistakably the brings to mind hammy pop product of a powerful urgency, crooners like Robert Goulet, but but it’s nothing like a teenager’s once you understand what he’s urgent desire to be understood, singing about—isolation, mad- which is easily frustrated and ness, helplessness, hopeless- just as easily spent. Instead it’s Scott Walker ness—the music’s profusion of like a monk’s desire for transcen- interlocking patterns starts to dence, expressed in a steadfast eruptions of metal and industrial sion that each song is happening time will carry on, as if to show seem outright claustrophobic. commitment to work patiently, a noise, Tilt is one the most shock- somewhere particular, not just in the others the way. Layers of The longer you listen the stranger little each day, toward a goal ing and unsettling records I own, a studio, but the album mashes electronic whizzes, blips, and it sounds: lush and beautiful that’s hardly understood. and its often lurid surface can together those small ambient chirps erupt unpredictably, songs about desperate, miserable Walker is 63, but neither yields make it hard to appreciate the noises—and the tiny private sometimes blending seamlessly people, overwhelmed as much by to the pressure to sound superfi- songs themselves. Walker’s new sounds of the body, like the into the mix and sometimes pok- their crowded psyches as their cially contemporary nor revisits disc redeploys the avant-garde crackling of saliva as Walker ing out grotesquely, like the crowded apartments. the feel of his canonized late-60s collage approach of Tilt in the whispers—with grandiose, sus- background hum of a refrigera- Of course, as Walker’s music material. The Drift is so idiosyn- service of his classic albums’ tained washes of discordant tor or a computer accidentally grew increasingly complex, inti- cratic that only his previous emotional impact. strings, subverting a healthy exaggerated by a hypersensitive mate, and harrowing, his com- record can provide a meaningful The overall mood is of horrible mind’s sense of scale. A rock microphone. Brief, poetic radio- mercial appeal dwindled. But context for it. With its sinister suspense, noirish and futuristic. band might try to get started, play-style dialogues enter and these four are still the records for undercurrents and occasional Field recordings create the illu- then give up, but one player at a exit, suggesting a story but never CHICAGO READER | MAY 12, 2006 | SECTION ONE 25 providing any context for it. And the key features of pop. Often the impose ideas about what connec- tracks earlier, making it hard to the more seductive because he then there’s Walker’s singing: he music seems like little more than tions might exist between his tell which parts are born of was so clearly reluctant to com- cavalierly stresses his words on a series of textures to resituate the images. Every song seems to pass which song or what the motifs ply with the expectations built the wrong syllables, deforming vocal line in different spaces. fluidly from one perspective to are supposed to mean. into the role, acting instead as them to fit the odd, dilated When you notice a guitar, it another, so that even when you’re The Drift is as tightly packed though he’d been somehow mys- melodies, but his voice is still the sounds distinctly like U.S. Maple sure something terrible is happen- with information as any record tically anointed to be a pop star same rich, crooning baritone, (or like the Magic Band with all ing it’s hard to tell who are the vic- I’ve ever heard, but it still leaves and had to play the part no mat- almost operatic in its grandeur. the blues boiled out), but it’s not tims and who are the perpetrators. much of its sonic space open and ter how burdensome he found it. It feels like The Drift is only a as though there’s a recognizable On the chorus of “Cossacks Are” unstructured. Walker needs that (Between them Bono and record by happenstance. It could rock lineup churning away Walker sings, “With an arm / space to generate suspense: Is the Michael Stipe have gotten a lot just as well exist in any other beneath the obscure tangle of Across the / Torso / Face on / The donkey about to start screaming, more mileage out of that routine medium—say, as a wall-size drones and effects. It’s often hard nails / With an arm / Across the / or is this where the distorted than Walker ever did.) painting or a dense experimental to identify any instruments at all, Torso / Face on / The pale / Daffy Duck comes scolding? But Walker now refuses that film. It’s impossible to process in fact, and in the few moments Monkey / Nails,” impalement As a young man Walker con- simple connection with his audi- from the perspective of any when a standard-issue band does imagery that’s echoed later in nected with his fans by providing ence. His recent music is gnostic musical genre, and tough to get take the lead, that sound is so “Buzzers”: “Polish / The fork / And them the same sort of vicarious and ecstatic—qualities that arise used to even when approached pointedly just one of a vast stick / The fork / In him.” Not catharsis that every pop singer from its meticulously chaotic on its own terms. After a few lis- assortment at Walker’s disposal even animals are safe: in “Jolson relies on. He told them how he form, not from his performances. tens, the sonic shocks around that it seems more like a sam- and Jones” two men try to out- felt, and they felt it with him—or There’s no spontaneity or improvi- pled track than a live group. bluster each other, taking turns more likely for him. He was all continued on page 26 The accompaniment occasion- shouting, “I’ll punch / A donkey / ally falls into an off-kilter bur- In the / Streets / Of Galway!” lesque bump reminiscent of the Gone are the tales of particu- Get Hustle or Love Life, but in lar, everyday people struggling to contrast to those bands’ discrete survive in dank 60s tenements— bursts, this is more a preposi- the people in The Drift could be tional music—it’s always living in the 10th century as easi- between states, on its way else- ly as the 20th, staring up at the where, never settled. It’s as indifferent stars in the godless though Walker has written songs heavens and shaking under the without verses or choruses, only weight of that terrible epiphany. long strings of bridges. When he The album’s press materials say loops a lopsided pattern for a few “Jesse” is about 9/11 refracted bars, the repetition is always a through Elvis’s relationship with every corner begin to seem discharge of tension, a brief his stillborn twin, set to a demol- inevitable—each one belongs reprieve from the music’s unre- ished version of “Jailhouse Rock,” exactly where it is—but they lenting instability. It’s a sound and insist that the lyrics to don’t get any less surprising, that seems like a slightly sexy, “Buzzers” conjoin the Balkan since the album’s amorphous slightly silly put-on when conflict of the 90s with the evo- structure makes it so hard to younger bands try it, but in lution of the horse, but you’d anticipate them.

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