Track Listing

1. Cossacks Are
2. Clara
3. Jesse
4. Jolson and Jones
5. Cue
6. Hand Me Ups
7. Buzzers
8. Psoriatic
9. The Escape
10. A Lover Loves

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88207 in Music
• Released on: 2006-06-06
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
It's been nine years since Walker's last album. "An increasingly revered figure, Scott Walker is a singular craftsman, one of rock's few individuals to demonstrate a willingness to both embrace elements of the unfashionable and ignore prevailing trends, yet also display an acute awareness of contemporary sound" - Pitchfork.

Customer Reviews

The Drift
With the Drift in my opinion, Scott Walker turns definately into a sci-fi-monster that are we. So personal that it's disturbing.

Art as Exorcism
Otto Dix, the early 20th-century German expressionist artist once said: "All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time."

Not all art may be exorcism, but Dix's statement certainly seems to apply to Scott Walker's most recent sound-with-text album, Drift. Since it is an exorcism, many pieces in the album address the issues that were troubling the artist. Some issues are more universal whereas some issues are more personal. On the whole, the Drift seems to deal with humans' cruelty and brutality against their fellow humans.

Examples: "Cossacks Are" ironically expresses the culture industry's unabashed commodification and reification of an artist; "Clara" dramatically tells the story of how a street mob treated of the dead bodies of Mussolini and Claretta Pettacci -- as objects like pork or beef ("The breasts are still heavy/ The legs long and straight/ The upper lip remains short ...") as manifested in Benito Mussolini's dream (I think Claretta is compared to the loyal Swallow in Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" - "Clara" does not present a simplistic world view); "Jesse" addresses the horrific event of 9/11 as a nightmare dreamt by Elvis Presley, representing American masses (I wonder if Scott Walker was inspired by Jean Baudrillard's statement: "That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, -- this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it" - translated by. Rachel Bloul); "Jolson and Jones," with a beginning stanza evocative of the famous first stanza of Eliot's The Waste Land, conveys the human brutality hidden under the banality of everyday social exchange in a place permeated with death, disease and decay instead of rebirth of the springtime.

I highly recommend this album to anybody who appreciates a challenging artistic experience.

One Swanky Record
Psst. With The Drift, Scott Walker has made the best record of the new century. Psst. That's in keeping for the man who made some of the best records of the last century, especially Scott 3 and Tilt. Psst. These aren't waltzes for dodo's. Psst. The strains of eeriness heard even on his recordings with The Walker Brothers are now fullblown and realized. Throughout this bleak soundscape, there are touches of absurdist humor that certify an artist at his peak dealing with an inane and indifferent world. Psst.