The Drift
review is the result of an email exchange between Dan Fox and Bob Stanley.
Dan Fox: Scott Walker’s first solo releases in the late 1960s signaled the musician’s fascination with European history and culture; songs by Jacques Brel, Ingmar Bergman films and Joseph Stalin. 1983’s The Climate of the Hunter marked a shift to the musical leftfield, a path Walker followed with Tilt (1996) and now, The Drift. This new album consciously disrupts what is expected of him: discordant string arrangements, his voice a strained tenor pitched far above his usual velvet baritone (he even does a Bugs Bunny impression at one point). Although portentous at times The Drift sounds as if Walker has teamed up with a dysfunctional post-Rock band: pounding asymmetrically accented drums, languid off-key guitar riffs, burbling electronic textures.
Bob Stanley: Walker has followed a path towards minimalism and atonality since the reformed Walker Brothers’ album Nite Flights in 1978. In this respect, The Drift is anything but surprising. I find 1960s Philips-era recordings like ‘Such A Small Love’ and ‘Big Louise’ far more claustrophobic and challenging than a Bugs Bunny impression. The avant garde doesn’t have to be devoid of melody.
DF I agree that experimentation doesn’t have to be ‘difficult’ but the The Drift’s tension is discordant dissolution rather than the crisp neurosis of his 1960s pop phase. It would be easy for Walker to follow the Burt Bacharach path and record a set of acoustic covers of his own back catalogue but he wants to sound like Györgi Ligeti. In places The Drift is undeniably hammy (literally on ‘Clara’, which features someone punching a side of pork) but no more laboured than earlier attempts to portray himself as an English-speaking Brel. Do you think Walker is now just playing at being an avant-garde musician?
BS I don’t doubt Walker’s sincerity, I just can’t believe this album is eleven years’ worth of ideas. Someone who moved to a monastery at the height of his fame and crashed his car to avoid a show was never going to be an ‘Unplugged’ contender. But a real challenge would be to take the ham-punching, atonality and suppressed violence, and fashion a set of 12 three-minute songs from them, with tunes. There is no greater challenge than to write a piece of music that can make people cry, and dissolution and instability have created some of the most intense and beautiful pop songs, like those on Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers (1975), which is hardly easy listening but always melodic. Do you think tears are a measure of music’s worth?
DF No; it limits the terms on which you engage with music – what about intellectual pleasure? I’m interested by your suggestion that it would be challenging for Walker to fashion 12 three-minute songs – why three minutes?
BS I wasn’t thinking of easy tears or sentimentality. I am a pop classicist, no denying it. A three-minute pop song is difficult to master. I think Walker would thrive under the pressure of less time to write and deliver something more stimulating than The Drift – brand new types of sound that could still take the top of your head off. I find the meat-thumping here utilitarian and one-dimensional. Also, his references to, say, David Bowie and Radiohead are more conventional than those he cited on his early records, such as Jean Sibelius and Brel. Do you not think there is an illusion of quality about Climate Of Hunter, Tilt, and The Drift?
DF I think that’s just another way of saying that he’s ‘dressing up’ at being the serious artist. If it took Walker eleven years to come up with this, then so be it – everyone’s got a different pace and there’s a lot to be said for taking your time. I think it’s encouraging that someone like Walker is out there just doing as he pleases.
