Music: Scott Walker & Sunn O))); T.I.; Panda Bear
Scott Walker has journeyed to strange places. In the 1960s, he was a pop icon (albeit an unconventional one) noted for his deliciously baritone balladeering. In the 1980s, he successfully transitioned to an avant-garde noisemaker.
Soused
4AD
Scott Walker has journeyed to strange places. In the 1960s, he was a pop icon (albeit an unconventional one) noted for his deliciously baritone balladeering. In the 1980s, he successfully transitioned to an avant-garde noisemaker.
His newest album, a collaboration with Seattle-based drone metal duo Sunn O))), is as dark as dark can be. It’s an imposition on the ears, consistently cruel and macabre. None of the five tracks are less than eight minutes long. Walker’s voice adds a silky, dissonant note that nearly topples into bathos. The music sounds as though it is rising, like hot and putrid air, from the deepest bowels of an inferno.
It’s effective. The “emotional” heart of the album is Fetish, which unleashes a bubble and froth of chilling sound effects – a perfect soundtrack for a horror film. It’s not pleasant, but it’s compelling.
Perhaps the best part of the album is the lyrical poetry, which takes time to emerge from the doom-and-gloom rubble: “The deer fly, the sand fly, the tsetse can’t find them.” It’s worth sorting through, if you can bear it.
