Scott Walker [Album Covers]

1967 Scott SR

1967 Looking Back With Scott Walker SR

1968 Scott 2 SR

1969 Scott 3 SR

1969 Scott 4 SR

1970 Til the Band Comes In SR

1972 The Moviegoer R

1973 Any Day Now R

1981 Sings Jacques Brel SR

1984 Climate of Hunter SR

1990 Boy Child: The Best of 1967-1970

1992 No Regrets: The Best of Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers R

1995 Tilt SR

1997 Stretch / We Had It All R

2003 5 Easy Pieces

2004 The Collection SR

2005 Classics & Collectibles SR

$[ 18 / 23 ] 2006 The Drift There were intermittent soundtrack and score contributions of varying magnitudes, as well as a couple other low-key projects, but The Drift is Scott Walkers proper follow-up to 1995s Tilt, an album that also happened to trail its predecessor by 11 years. If 1984s Climate of Hunter put the MOR in morose, Tilt avoided the road completely and went straight toward the fractured, fraught images inside Walkers nightmares. It was entirely removed from anything that couldve been classified as contemporary. The Drift isnt an equally severe leap from Tilt, but it is darker, less arranged, alternately more and less dense, and ultimately more frightening. Maybe itll make your body temperature drop a few degrees. Working with what Walker has referred to as "blocks of sound," only a few of the albums 68 minutes have any connection to rock music, and many of those minutes are part of a harrowing 9/11 song that also obliquely references "Jailhouse Rock" as Elvis Presley cries out ("Im the only one left alive!") to his stillborn twin brother. The songs swing from hovering drones to crushing jolts. The blocks that make them, then, differ tremendously in weight, from one that could be pushed by an index finger to one that could only be hauled by a forklift. Whenever a vast shaft of space opens up, it is eventually stuffed with drastic, horrific dissonance. While a song might contain a constant element or two, theyre all in a constant state of unease and flux. Walkers voice matches the activity levels of the sounds, providing a kind of paranoid croon one minute and then, during another, casting almost demonic projections that are nearly as rattling as the accompaniment. From the outset, the album seems impossibly insular and impenetrable, especially if youve been led to believe that Scott Walkers name is synonymous with recluse, but it has everything to do with real lives (or, more accurately, real deaths). Walker is acutely aware of whats going on with the world outside his supposed candle-lit bunker; hes only finding very unique (OK, bloody minded) ways to bring them up. Any mystique behind the recordings is laid to waste by one scene from a documentary, titled 30 Century Man, which shows Walker -- a baseball hat-wearing sixty-something man from Ohio -- instructing another man on how to thump a slab of meat. It looks and sounds absurd, of course (the participants seem to be aware of this), but then again, the results are used in a song inspired by the public executions of Benito Mussolini and his mistress. Broken spells aside, how much more bleak could this album be? None more bleak.$

2006 The Drift SR

2007 And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? S

2012 Bish Bosch SR

2013 Scott: The Collection 1967-1970 S

$[ 22 / 23 ] 2014 Soused Soused is unlike any previous Scott Walker recording for two reasons. First, its a complete collaboration with the doom drone duo Sunn 0))); second, it, unlike any of his albums since 1984s Climate of Hunter, requires no previous context for appreciation. While these five tracks are undeniably "heavy," as a whole the music is more conventionally "melodic" than one would anticipate from this pairing. Sunn 0)))s Greg Anderson and Stephen OMalley add their third guitarist, Tos Nieuwenhuizen, while Walker is again assisted by longtime associate keyboardist and sound sculptor Peter Walsh, with an unusually small cast of players. "Brando" kicks off with bright keyboards and Nieuwenhuizen playing lead lines straight out of 80s pop-metal. Walkers baritone erupts like hes singing musical theater: "Ah the wide Missouri/Dwellers on the bluff/Across the wide Missouri..." before his centered denouement admits "...No, never enough...." Sunn 0)))s overdriven power drones, a bass drum, and the sound of cracking bullwhips enter before Walker intones: "A beating would do me a world of good." The fractured imagistic narrative unfolds lyrically and sonically, juxtaposing pastoral nature with violence as the language of exchange in power and submission, religiously and carnally. In "Herod 2014," Walker addresses one of his favorite topics: totalitarianism. He uses the New Testament narrative of the slaughter of innocents as a metaphor for the endgame of state paranoia. Amid distorted and detuned angular guitar drones are massive throbbing keyboard and drum effects and a lone bell. Though sometimes nearly drowned in the mix, the bell is constant -- the mothers voice protecting her children. "Bull"s atonal guitars squall onto a wall of sine-wave hum, feedback, Moog, bleating trumpet, and voices in dynamic textural shifts. Its dangerously, deliciously close to heavy metal. "Lullaby" is the most abstract thing here, yet its recurring sectional themes are easy to accommodate. A limited palette of sonic colors creates a frame for doomy, droning, and stinging metallic guitar riffs, dissonant and melodic keyboard effects, and programmed drums. Throughout the set, Walkers lyrics are more than poetic devices; theyre textural and sonic elements that add dimension to his singing. As defined here, "Soused" accurately means "drenched" in sound. Walkers and Sunn 0)))s individual identities, while always on full display, are brought jaggedly and thunderously together in an enthralling recording that equals the sum of its mighty parts.$

2014 Soused SR

2016 The Childhood of a Leader S