Scott Walker
The Drift

THE REVIEW

Those who enjoyed TILT, Scott Walker's previous album from as far back as 1995, will not want to miss this new sonic adventure from the brilliant American musician. Taking the dissolution of song form to its extreme consequences, Walker crafts a complex one-way journey into a chilling void that somewhat recalls the Schubertian Lieder of the cycle “Winterreise”, updating them.

The ten pieces that make up the framework of “The Drift” are immersed in a desolate and hopeless atmosphere, musically rendered by an alternation of fullness and emptiness (orchestral bursts and deep silences) and the use of surprising sound solutions: from the “big box” of wood hit with a piece of cement in “Cue” to the shawn in “Clara”, from the sound of footsteps descending a staircase in “Jolson and Jones” to the dizzying magma of the orchestra accompanying Scott's baritone voice, from this very voice that declaims in the spatial void of “Jesse” the despair of the solitary man: “I'm the only one left alive”. Not to mention the chilling, diabolical, unexpected Donald Duck screaming at the end of “The Escape” like a monstrous childhood ghost. The lyrics are striking for their modernity of writing and for the complexity and variety of themes touched upon: ranging from the love story between Claretta Petacci and the Duce (“Clara”), to AIDS (“Cue”), to Bosnia (“Buzzers”), the complex analogies of 9/11 (“Jesse”), to war, Bush, etc. The hallucinatory journey unexpectedly closes with an actual song: featuring an unsettling “pst-pst” executed with the voice, dressed only with an acoustic guitar, “A lover loves” is the final solo that the priest Walker grants his audience just before the curtain falls (forever) on him.