Scott Walker
The Drift

THE REVIEW

Disturbing lacerations that carve experiences at the edge of the paranoid tending towards the satanic.
But this is just the beginning: are you ready to descend into the deep bowels of this experience? Dark prophet of other music alien to time, space, and the near future, this "The Drift" is a work imbued with existence and a high rate of hallucination, like a sponge soaked in oil, carnality, and sweat. Eleven years of waiting to vomit out 10 obsessive, pounding, desperate, howling, dark, and gloomy nightmares without a clear direction despite the title. Even the ghosts of bygone Italy are mentioned (Claretta Petacci and Mussolini exhumed in "Clara") in a disorienting ambient noise like electric drills aimed straight at the temples, eardrums attacked as in demonic rituals of black sabbaths like eclipses of moons, dissonant visions and sounds, sudden air voids, and low notes sung with airless whispers.
Despair turned into music.
More than a song, a desperate plea for help, a desperate journey toward total perdition.
But even further down.
"Jesse," dedicated to Elvis's brother, begins with vibrations full of anxiety between agonizing and dark guitar counterpoints.
No way of escape.
No way out.
"Cue" returns us a Walker increasingly possessed and archaic in his demonic presence out of control.
One cannot breathe in this album.
There is a need for air, but from here only comes the unbearable fetid stench of a thousand lifeless pestilent breaths with no possibility of redemption. Desperately fascinating, like the magnetism of a satanic mantra of a sect for a few unscrupulous adepts.
One perceives avalanches of violent and masturbatory sounds, interspersed with creaks, doors opening, entries to imaginary films to which no access is given.
With "Cossacks Are," one begins to dig through leaden sludges and inorganic material, the lifeblood of this desperately and arcane fascinating album, between syncopated hypnotic rhythms supporting a sickly vocal sewn with dissonant patterns suspended between echoes and sounds from the underworld, children of millennia-old curses or ancient human sacrifices.
Air, there is a desperate need for air. Open those windows, my god! let a glimmer of light in! open those shutters!
On with "Buzzers," a strange tango in dodecaphonic fluctuations, desperate and lucid at the same time, culminating in a sort of collective voodoo.
Again "Hand Me Ups" the most accomplished as a song, but one immediately dives back into the pond of sonic putrescence with "Jolson and Jones" or the damned "The Escape" ("thank you Mr K"): an absolutely devastating track with no way out: swarms, muffled screams, spectral presences, lead us to increasingly dark places dragged on this hearse of desperate inevitable existential anguish.
It closes with "A Lover Loves," which loosens for a few minutes the noose tight around the neck: an apocalyptic ballad for voice and guitar, where the demonic Scott intones a painfully apocalyptic lullaby on the imminent end of the world.
And finally the air. The album stops thrashing my soul, and I cling to what little remains of me for interminable seconds reflecting on the emptiness of this existence, exhausted and worn as I haven't in a long time...
Just a few minutes. Then I fling open the windows and try to let in as much light as possible.

Devastating album: strongly discouraged for those who have contemplated suicide even once.
(This time it could be fatal).