Scott Walker. (RIP March 2019)

i, too, love them all and will probably love what i haven't heard yet. 4 is my favorite and i think it compares very favorably to 3. fin

yeah nobody is arguing that 4 isn't awesome. they are ALL awesome (meaning LPs 1-4). hell, I even like the last few tracks on Til the Band Comes In and listen to Stretch for pleasure.

sorry, i take it back

4 has "the seventh seal," right? that's a point not in its favor IMO.

― espring (amateurist), Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:32 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sod the lyrics, it's an amazing starting track to an amazing record. i still have trouble separating and also listening sequentially to the first three albums - they all seem very much part of the same work with strong songs and not so strong songs, but 4 is a different very separate work in my eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XprkIbphGf8

I usually find the Seventh Seal a bit too embarrassing to listen to. Just those opening lyrics are soooo on the nose. And the songs are great...but the arrangement is more conventional that 3, it's almost more genre in a way. I love it but I think it sounds more dated than 3. It trades the romance of much of the first 3 for something a bit more r&b/rock or something.

My Scott Walker playlist opens with Prologue/Little Things That Keep Us Together before going into selections from 1-4 chronologically.

i just listened to 3 all the way through. it's really great but i don't agree that 4 has aged. i find the first three a little bit over-flamboyant in places. guess you could say the same about some parts of 4 though, granted.

Boy Child is the song on 4 that sounds like it would fit on 3.

It was originally released in late 1969 under his birth name, Noel Scott Engel (the name Walker did not appear on the original album sleeve)

Selzer otm

Scott 4 reminds me of Bryter Layter for some reason. Is that strange?

No not at all. Stott's way with the orchestra more overtly eerie tho.

boy child has some amazing grace notes in the string arrangement, hoo boy

makes me think of outer space

He's super-pretentious! Bt that's part of why I love him, I don't think he (or anyone, prob) is capable of fully achieving what he aims at, bt his attempts're wonderful. The Drift is one of the most powerful art experiences I've ever had

yeah, you have to laugh (and so does SW, I think) when these euro-art dudes are slamming sides of beef to get just the right sound of human degradation or whatever. it's almost a parody of self-serious modern composition. but the results are completely awesome.

Just heard "30 Century Man" blimey, no wonder Julian Cope likes him, it sounds more like him than he does!

I know you were using "pretentious" in a complimentary sense but I mean that's his actual name, how is it pretentious to put a record out under your actual name

xps obv

The quote "a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened" (credited to the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus) appears on the back of the sleeve of the album.

it's not pretentious to use your name; IIRC there was no name whatever on the original front and possibly back cover. sort of like that palace album. but i might be wrong.

i wasn't using pretentious in a complimentary sense, really. i just think his greatness is kind of inextricable from his pretentiousness.

It's pretentious in the sense that he's shedding his stage name. No more time for childish things. Like when Johnny Cougar became John Cougar then John Cougar Mellencamp then just John Mellencamp. Same exact thing.

wait until he writes a novel and uses the name J.C. Mellencamp

tbf I think the cougar/mellencamp thing was mostly him trying to gradually get away from a stupid stage name that his manager had foisted on him as a young man

whereas "scott walker" sounds great. or did, until a certain someone was elected governor here.

nah, 4 is next-level

― mattresslessness, Tuesday, 25 March 2014 22:06 (3 days ago) Bookmark

Yep, just listened to 4 for the first time, this ^^

Different level rather than next level... I'm a 3 man meself of course.

The last 3 tracks on 4:

Bob Dylan
Kris Kristofferson
Cliff Richard.

(but, like, really good ones)

i like the songs on "scott 4" where he ends the song by scat-singing. which is, like, half of them. also hard to find a more vicious anti-war song than "hero of the war". most brutal use of "bo diddley" ever.

ha, i never made the bo diddley hand jive connection.

the most brutal line is probably "the emptiness of heroes like your son..."

This was a strange thing to have done, what, couple of years after "Climate of Hunter", did he think his career was over?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2EoduCLKYY

Noh, I got the feeling it was a favour to a friend.

A bit like his song on "Die another day" soundtrack, which was a bit like an old Scott style song/arrangement sung in his more 'recent' vocal style.

Right, I could never work out why he did it. (btw I almost mentioned you in the post because I thought you'd be the only other person who'd remember the ad when it was on).

£££

ha, just about yes.

Yes, but he would surely have had better offers than appearing in a soft drink advert as a hasbeen?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuWjITjG2l4

Scott influence, you reckon?

£££

Pretty sure one of the bios, either the documentary or A Deeper Shade of Blue, suggested that Scott has had benefactors over the years that have helped insulate him from the vagaries of the open market.

That said, this discussion makes me think that the really interesting move artistically for Scott right now would be if instead of beating meat with a tennis racket or whatever he took all these tricks he's learned in the last 20 years and put them into a straightforward pop album.

Suspect it would never happen but he's flirted enough over the last decade or so with the mainstream (not only the Bond song but Pulp) that you never know...

I liked the backing vocals he did for that bat for lashes song

xp yeah i'd like him to do something a bit different now. Bish Bosch took the aesthetic about as far as it could go, but Soused was when it started getting parodic.

soused is great

Listening to Soused now. Seems like the Sunn O))) fit is good. The droning power chords in the bgd works for him.

Part of me thinks that Scott was making a point in 1995: that the old chains of the industry and star machine simply weren't conducive to his artistic vision anymore. That for him to grow and explore new areas he needed to explicitly reject his past as an idol.

In a lot of ways, his turn reminds me of John Fahey's, who, like Scott, repudiated the work that made him famous and forged a late-career path that infuriated most of his fans. Fahey seemed to enjoy their anger even. But neither of them totally gave up on their earlier work – Scott as noted upthread but also Fahey, who before he died seemed particularly open to playing acoustic material again, albeit acoustic material informed by the drones and reverberations of his electric work.

In some ways, Scott seems even better positioned to make a new turn toward something that less explicitly rejects his previous oeuvre and maybe even continues to embrace some of his political leanings that have been popping up since Tilt or so, while also recognizing that musically there may not be too much further into the abyss he can go.

But even beyond that, I feel like the world has changed since 1995 – in particular, that star system Scott so resented 20 years ago has pretty much collapsed and this global landscape he tried to hasten of artistic liberty, open collaboration and avant experimentation has been embraced on so many levels. In essence, Scott won – and it's time he acknowledged the victory and maybe changed with it.

Amazing thread revival. Never thought I'd hear Tom Jones doing Spacemen 3.

http://justasong2.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/gillian-welch-elvis-presley-blues.html

.. But I admit you got me.

I think there are many many worthwhile directions he can go still in scott 2.0 mode while still maintaining his 'a man alone, singing', 'no grooving pls', jolt them awake, instrument-selection-as-word-painting core.

I'm not sure Scott has repudiated his old stuff, so much as that he just can't go back there - and I'm not sure that a more conciliatory record would get him many more sales than he has now - plus, this stuff isn't so totally removed from the song form, vocal performance and abstract lyrical content of the 'classic' records, and the operatic quality to his singing is a ,from soup to piece of meat slapped against a tennis racket

also Jon otm

singing is a constant, from

Maybe scott doesnt want to go 'back'