59. Scott Walker - The Drift (2006)

Repeated themes crop up in The Drift. Silver. Torture. Genocide. That terrifying feeling when it suddenly dawns the body you are looking at is dead, injured, deliberately disfigured. Cossacks Are..."The teeth are too small", Cue..."Bones closing - too soon at the tips". Multiple voices, perspectives muddled. David Lynch style crawls around shadowy corners, doorways.
The violence of retribution, witnessed, enjoyed by crowds, the mutilation of a hanging Mussolini & wife, tribes decapitating each other, Sadaam Hussein hung to baying, mocking audience.
It's not inconceivable once immersing yourself in any recent (i.e. the last 30 years) Scott album that it took 11 years to create. The 30th Century Man doc provides some insight into the mental effort required by Scott and his cohorts to make these monstrous records, where you can see a man hitting a large piece of raw pig with a stick, and Scott visibly anxious about the quality of sound made by hitting a large handmade wooden box.
The Drift is not a comforting listen, it is adult, dark, challenging at times downright scary. It is also original, majestic, endlessly fascinating and hideously beautiful, in the way that Lynch's, Herzog's, Bergman's, Chris Morris' and Frances Bacon's art can be.
Each lyric and block of sound in The Drift is there for a reason. The song Jesse offers the premise of Elvis speaking to his stillborn twin, it begins "Nose holes caked in black cocaine" and ends with the pained cry of "I'm the only one left alive" in Scott's unique mad mock rock goth operatic baritone. Jolson and Jones contains the call "I'll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway" complete with braying donkey noises, whilst managing to be entirely serious. Cue seems to be about viruses. Hand me ups, despite having a reasonably jaunty rhythm contains the most explicit images of torture and war on the album. Buzzers again perhaps concern violent political revenge, and begins with a quote about Milosevic. The Escape is as scary as shit, and almost has a rhyme scheme, at the close of the track a huge evil Donald duck repeats "What's up Doc", I have heard this numerous times and I still get nervous when I know it is coming. This moment reminds me of the stories of American troops blasting US cultural pop and cartoon sounds at war prisoners as a torture device during the Gulf wars. To be listened to with teddy bear to hand.
Finally, A Lover Lovers almost offers respite in a beautiful acoustic ballad, however Scott manages to undermine this by going "Psst Psst Psst" between each line. Truly perverse.
I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Roll on 2023!