'The Drift' is an extraordinary piece of work, even more challenging and expansive than Scott Walker's startling last album, 'Tilt' from 1995. It could pass for some bizarre record beamed in from a future in which all other music has been forgotten.
Song structures, harmony and rhythm have had to be re-imagined from scratch. String players no longer possess the concept of melody and generate thick, immobile clouds of sound. Guitarists struggle with doomy lower register scrapings. Drum players attempt an occasional primitive beat, but more often than not are thwarted by shuddering electronics grinding against the beat.
Above all of this, Scott's voice soars, still breathtaking, dripping melancholic emotion after 40 years crooning. Only nowadays, it's almost impossible to remember the fact that he was once the frontman of a 1960s boyband, Beatlesesque in their popularity, hysterical female fans included.
On just a handful of listens, I wouldn't dare guess what 'The Drift' is 'about'. Scott's lyrics are so dense and often buried by blankets of orchestral noise (think experimental composers such as Xenakis, Penderecki or Ligeti's music as used in Stanley Kubrick's '2001'). There are some surreal, warlike and violent images. "This is not a terrapin, with its shell torn away, like what happened in America", Scott tells us on the second track, 'Clara'. The gothic absurdity reaches a peak on 'Jolson and Jones', with its chant of "I'll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway". Elsewhere in that track, the lyrics are disturbingly vacant and prosaic; "it's a lovely afternoon", we are unconvincingly reassured.
If all this sounds overwhelmingly pretentious, well, 'The Drift' is certainly overwhelming, by design. It is also glorious in its pretension, striving to be something new at every corner, trying out different ways of organising sound and organising the studio, myriad ideas within every track.
What this most resembles is some combination of avant-garde horror film and harrowing modernist opera. Take the chilling moment in 'Jesse' where Scott admits, "I'm the only one left alive", or the sinister opening of 'Buzzers' with its desperate search through radio channels. Most terrifying of all, take the horrifying, distorted and incomprehensibly guttural vocals at the close of penultimate track, 'The Escape'.
Magically, after all this turmoil, the air clears for the album's closer, 'A Lover Loves'. Here, Scott is accompanied by a simple rocking acoustic guitar. Yet even in this moment of calm, Scott interrupts the melody with insistent hisses, "Psst! Psst!". Relentless; even in the eye of the storm we are forcibly sat up straight and made to pay attention to this most commanding of musical achievements.
