Scott Walker
Bish Bosch

While plucking feathers from a swansong... 

"Bish Bosch", clear example of senile dementia (detractors will say) or Bish Bosch, yet another masterpiece (die-hard fans will shout out loud)? 

"Bish Bosch", pure nonsense delirium or music so far ahead that we just can't understand?

I'll grease this pole behind me. 

"The Drift" had put even the most seasoned listeners to the test, dragging them into a world littered with horrors, distortions, and dissonances, where the only possibility of orientation was given by Scott's voice, warm, operatic, charming.

A voice that, a moment later, however, could push you even further down into the maelstrom. 

And leave you there. Alone. With all the fears of a small and insignificant man faced with immensity.

Pain is not alone. P-a-i-n-i-s-n-o-t-a-l-o-n-e! 

It's difficult to return to the audience that, devotedly, had let itself be taken by the hand and carried adrift, to the edge of sound, of music, where music stopped being such and became an almost religious and cathartic experience. It's challenging to bear the weight of expectations and release an album that shines with its own light when its predecessor is a majestic (and seemingly definitive) work like "The Drift", but...

Scott Walker did it again.

"Bish Bosch" completes (he declared to have finished this musical journey and intends to dedicate himself to other things) the ambitious discourse that began with "Tilt" and continued with "The Drift" with unexpectedly satisfying results. The style does not significantly deviate from that of the 2008 masterpiece, although in "Bish Bosch" a humorous vein emerges more prominently than in "The Drift", where it was only hinted at. And the moments of stasis, which are not lacking in this work either, mostly give way to continuous and pressing incursions. A series of sonic assaults galore.

If shit were music, you'd be a brass band. 

It is clearly a black humor, black as pitch. But more than once, I found myself passing from a state of anxiety (at night, not even the blankets save you from the malice of this venerable storyteller) to a smug smile listening to the countless parts that make up Walker's latest work. An album capable of evoking contrasting emotions arising from the (daring but) successful combination of instruments and ideas that would fight in ordinary contexts. "Bish Bosch" is nothing but a sonic collage, an album deliberately and intrinsically discontinuous, but which, paradoxically, finds its raison d'être in its irreverent fragmentation.

I've severed my reeking gonads, fed them to your shrunken face. 

The themes, like the lyrics that contain them, draw from the evergreen field of violence. Walker, with not too thinly veiled complacency, leverages the morbid curiosity that prompts all of us to investigate and take an interest in the brutalities perpetrated over the centuries by human beings. Hence, the appearance in the unhealthy potpourri of uncomfortable figures like the Romanian "Conducator" Ceausescu (to whom the final track is dedicated), Attila, or even the Nazis in "Corps De Blah" and many more... All seasoned with medical terminology, colorful insults of various kinds, astral references (and many other citations that can be caught after careful re-reading.

You will wander like alienated travelers among frantic electronics ('See You Don't Bump His Head'), tribalism and kraut-inspired incursions ("Epizootics!" and "Phrasing"), desolate silences, flatulence alternated with poignant violins ("Corps De Blah"), guitar turns with a (doom-)metal flavor, very brief acoustic parentheses, while Scott... talks, over-talks, narrates, declaims, and assaults us with his voice constantly suspended between sweetness and venomous unease.

Ah yes, I forgot the machete blows inserted in more than one track ----> 

When you turn in your sleep, will you roll across the path? 

With these words, Scott leaves us at the end of "The Day "The Conducator" Died (A Xmas Song)" and the whole work, along with the notes of "Jingle Bells" that perhaps have never been so disturbing outside of the Christmas context.

The journey to the edges of music, where it no longer makes sense to speak of song form, of structure in the canonical sense, is over.

And if "Tilt" was the starter, "The Drift" first and second courses served in a single serving, there could not have been a better dessert than this "Bish Bosch".

PS: Actually, it would be a 4.5, but Scott definitely deserves a roundup.

PPS: The title, with an almost anti-phrastic flavor, is the combination of the term "bish" (which stands for "bitch") and "Bosch" which stands for Hieronymus Bosch, the famous Flemish painter.