Scott Walker ~ The Drift: first impressions

Thanks to a friend’s kindness, I’m able to listen to The Drift, Scott Walker’s new missive from the outlands of experience. I’ve had the opportunity to listen to it for some days now, except that I haven’t actually done so. Well, I have listened to the opening track, Cossacks Are, three times and once to tracks two through four, Clara, Jesse and Jolson and Jones. Why not the whole thing yet? Because I’m nervous that it will dilute the power of its predecessor. I’ve eulogised previously about 1995′s Tilt, Walker’s last proper release – barring his soundtrack Pola X – though somehow fittingly I can’t now locate the post. I’m dipping into it on impulse only. So these will be very sparse first thoughts.

There’s a (…) microsite online now. It’s a failure of the imagination. Something creative might have been done, but instead it supplies a tracklist, an essay, photographs, timeline, downloadable desktop pictures and a singularly unimpressive video. Possibly the only useful offering is the lyrics – I don’t know whether these are included with the CD…
The front cover, which is all I’ve seen so far (I’ll be getting a copy – review or otherwise), is credited to 4AD’s Vaughan Oliver, but it looks to me very like Russell Mills’ work. With its furnace-like textures, it’s also redolent of David Lynch, which might well be apposite…
The scorched-earth operatic vocalisms of Climate of Hunter and Tilt are present again…
The guitar figures on Cossacks Are sound like new wave gestures pinned and pared to a heraldic flourish. The track appears to proffer a subtle challenge threaded with pride, a gauntlet thrown down to the unwary listener…
The next three tracks, all christened with proper nouns, hang like palls, are forbidding verging upon fearsome…
Clara is the longest track on The Drift at 12 minutes 45 seconds. It sounds, first time round, like a film rendered in sound (not, though, one of those soundtracks for an imaginary film that was a thankfully shortlived critical concept a decade or so ago)… Clara is psychological horror, dark and rent with gloom, except for sudden, searing interruptions… it reminds me of the unease of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy…
The Drift doesn’t sound as shocking as Tilt, but it does sound riven, wracked, terrified…