Scott Walker - The Drift (2-LP) Import 2012

He never really went anywhere, but he's back again at the ripe age of 63 anyway. Sounding younger than ever before, Scott Walker's spirit truly soars here. There are a lot of ways you might introduce the stunning and towering singularity of Walker's new work The Drift. As the critic Cynthia Ozick once said of novelist William Gaddis (three novels in thirty years): he may not have been "prolific," but "instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic." Hungry logic? Oh yes: songs you feel you could almost run a finger along and come away with brick dust or splinters, traces of blood curdled sand. It's the immense and beckoning, blistering noise of The Drift that tells the real story here, but also the microscopic attention to 'background' detail, layer upon layer, quotations, discreet little sonic movies full of scent and chill and bruise, clue and ricochet and close up. Walker more or less invents a world with each new song, the shock of which being partly that he should treat subjects like this at all, that he should treat us with this immoderate cast: Cossacks framed in mnemonic petals, ill-fated lovers rubbing shoulders like dead moons, Elvis baying in Memphis moonlight, Mussolini hanging like something from a Francis Bacon tarot deck, songs for and from all our Black Septembers, all our German autumns, all the nines, elevens, ones, zeros in a mangle of newspeak. There are a lot of self-proclaimedly 'experimental' artists clamoring for our attention, but who else gives us so much space in song, yet still a recognizable song, one marked by sex and pity and perplexity and rage, all the while keeping his ego to a bare minimum. Who else allows so many other voices; unlikely, unmoored, unmourned voices, into his songs?