Review: Scott Walker's The Drift

I have several reasons to find musical genius Scott Walker and his latest album, The Drift, of interest.

I live in Maida Vale, and he famously did, during perhaps his most creative period. Secondly, and more importantly, up until this new release, I though I had created the most densely-packed, poetic, Brechtian and challenging "modernist-cabaret" soundscape full-length CD. It turns out the CD I co-wrote and developed with award-winning Canadian composer/ musician Tom Walsh (entitled The Envelope, Please, see links below) is, compared to Mr. Walker's latest, about as accessible as a Looney Tunes reel.

The Drift is impossible to listen to, and impossible to turn away from - it has the impact of very bad news.

It does not need long for a critic to establish how strange and off-putting this is, when one considers that Walker proudly spliced in sounds of raw meat being violently punched, and one approximately ten-minute song minutely explores the agon of Mussolini's mistress being strung up like a pig in the public square beside Il Duce himself - the interminable-yet-riveting interior monologue both harrowing and weirdly moving.

Walker was always too much - that is what makes him an original, and important. His wild Expressionist acting out makes most performance art seem dull - he is, quite simply, the agent of what is most over-the-top in musical theatre. Imagine if an echo-chambered, tormented Jacques Brel (no doubt punching a raw steak) wrote and sang songs of sheer nihilistic dread... accompanied by elaborate compositions without any notably clear narrative or symphonic structure, plus strings from Psycho, prepared instruments from John Cage, with repeated phrases like "what happen in America" and "black cocaine" - chillingly poetic snippets mixed in with strange aphorisms ("I'll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway").

"I'm the only one left alive" croons a deranged Elvis mourning his twin brother who died in childbirth. Later, amidst the sounds of a braying ass being slaughtered, we hear Walker moan "Curare, Curare" - just after singing the praises of "the grossness of spring".

What is happening here? Walker has the sound of the last century in his "bloody head" and "lolls against the window" - gazing out in anguish and wanting to aesthetically transmogrify it all - excercised by the vulnerable body and nature's maggot-fed corruptions.

At times, the album sounds like it might break in to a punch-drunk musical from the 50s, like "The Most Happy Fella" - and then gets hijacked by a demented Bernard Hermann. Our age's extremes of taste - and mental states - seems one of the main themes of this drifting journey up Walker's sinuous flowing influences to the dark heart of things. Mistah Kurt Weill, he dead.

To be admired, and frankly, at times feared, The Drift is likely to be the goth-spiral-into-madness-soundtrack of choice for intensely pensive readers of 20th century German philosophy and early Eliot; for the rest, it simply remains the most daunting and persuasively conceived anti-pop-album of the 21st century - a work that resists any label but Art; one wants to add Brut, to that.

Art Brut then, with broken glass and scuttling rats.

Eyewear gives it 5 out of 5 specs.

http://www.4ad.com/scottwalker/

http://www.aelaq.org/mrb/article.php?issue=9&article=192&cat=3

http://wiredonwords.com/SwiftyLazarus.html

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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