drifting with scott walker
By DJ M on May 8th, 2006
In Miscellaneous Music
N.B.-- According to a publicist at Scott Walker's current label, 4AD, "Due to the complicated printing process involved with the detailed nature of the packaging, the release date has been slightly delayed. Previously May 9th - it will now be released on May 23rd. HOWEVER - itunes will still carry the album on May 9th."
THE GUARDIAN 1 “The Drift is like little else in music. The melodic austerity, somewhere between plainsong and operatic recitative, may shock fans of Walker's lush 1960s records but, gloriously, The Drift is a record that demands a lot of work and repays tenfold.”
THE GUARDIAN 2 “If anything, the tracks on The Drift seem a step further away from the mainstream into ever more dense and impenetrable realms. There are moments that make Tilt sound like the Kaiser Chiefs. The Drift features bursts of screaming noise and unbearably tense silences, and ruminations on 9/11, the death of Mussolini's mistress Clara Petacci and the current obsession with celebrity, of which Walker takes an unsurprisingly dim view…”
MUSIC OMH "This material shreds any conventional notion of the song. This is rock music as high art - there are no verse-chorus-verse structures here. There is nothing so simple or linear, no law, no rules, just expression in its purest form. Musical reference points are difficult to discover or disclose. Penderecki arranged by Iain Sinclair. Morton Feldman's tonal clusters sprinkled with TS Elliot's dark verse. An audio version of Picasso's Bombing of Guernica. Francis Bacon's searing paintings turned into a classical score. To trace The Drift's bloody pathways, unpick its dense impressionistic lyrics, requires secret knowledge, a broken compass and total immersion into its world."
THE INDEPENDENT "No less dense than its predecessor, The Drift tips the scales as the most weighty album to be issued by a major artist this year, possibly this decade. That's 'major' as in important, not mainstream."