Scott Walker: Bish Bosch
Scott Walker
Bish Bosch
(4AD)
It has become increasingly hard to define the music of Scott Walker.
The legendary and enigmatic former 60′s pop star with a golden voice has made notoriously difficult music over the past 30 years, and typically releases one album per decade.
Bish Bosch is not as downright terrifying and exhausting an album as 2006âs The Drift, but itâs every bit as jarring. Where the last album might have had you spending every minute cowering in fear of what lurked around the corner, Bish Bosch is far more immediate and aggressive. In a year when so many indie bands put out laptop synth records, itâs refreshing to get a solid kick in the nether regions from a nearly 70-year-old man.
Walkerâs later-day trademarks are all here: dissonant strings and nightmarish arrangements, chilling silences, wailing atonal vocals and obtuse lyrics (touching on the likes of former dictators, Hawaii, brown dwarf stars, and Attila the Hunâs court jester), and atypical instrumentation like ramâs horns and sharpened machetes for percussion.
The opening âSee You Donât Bump His Headâ is set atop a pummeling distorted drum and interjects jagged guitar riffs and distorted keyboards bringing it at times close to industrial metal, and the woozy brass and rhythms of âEpizootics!â make it among the most easily digestible songs Walkerâs put out in a long time.
The epic 20 minutes of âSDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)â contain practically an entire album of ideas, and Walkerâs voice hauntingly stretches into new places, whether scream-metal or high pitched crooning. Otherwise, amid the chaos, and uh⊠farting sounds, of âCorps De Blah,â the string arrangements at time sound melodious, and the sparse, icy finish âThe Day the âConducatorâ Died (An Xmas Song)â has sleigh bells and what could be considered an actual chorus, and slyly closes with a few notes of âJingle Bells.â
I wonât even get started on the lyrics, but letâs just say they have to be heard and read to be believed (âNo more dragging this wormy anus round shag piles from Persia to Thrace / Iâve severed my reeking gonads, fed them to your shrunken faceâ).
Bish Bosch is not for everybody and is hard to recommend to most people. But itâs by far the most compelling record of 2012 and demonstrates that Walker is in a completely different league from not only his 60âs peers, but his much younger contemporaries as well.