Drifting into the black with Scott Walker

I discovered Scott Walker via the slightly circuitous route of David Sylvian, reading a review of one of Sylvian's later albums, Blemish, where the reviewer noted that it was weird but not as weird as Scott Walker's later work. I guess I have always been a little drawn to the weird, and so bought Scott Walker's two latest albums, Tilt (1995) and the Drift (2006) a couple of days ago. In some ways, I guess that neither of these albums are like music at all in the traditional sense - especially the Drift - but the enormous power of these sounds, as arresting as they are chilling, shows us once again how many shapes and forms music can take.

the Drift is made of ten horrifyingly bleak tracks (well, nine, really - the last track, "A Lover Loves", provides the album's only glimpse of peace). The music switches from moments of barren emptiness to sudden hair-raising, spine-chilling bursts of sound, coming from haunted combinations of symphonic orchestra, bizarre electronic sounds and even, at one stage, the beat of a baseball bat on a dead animal carcass. Timpani pound beneath dark discordant strings; unworldly winds wail and whine in the night. And Scott Walker's voice is itself both beautiful and ghostly at the same time - an almost operatic baritone, rich and cavernous. The songs have strange lyrics and strange topics - often difficult to understand in any conventional way - such as "Clara", with its ghastly outbursts of terror, inspired by the public hanging of Mussolini and his girlfriend; or "Jesse", eerie and anguished, based on tales of Elvis Presley talking to his stillborn twin brother. The lyrics are strewn with odd, unsettling images, as with the opening lines of "Jolson and Jones", "As the grossness of spring lolls its head against the window" or, in "Cue", "chiming like mouse bells at the birth of a vermin Holy Ghost".

Scott Walker himself says his aim is to create "blocks of sound" rather than a linear flow of melodies and rhythms. The lyrics work similarly - phrases and images, rather than a story.

He's not the first to do that and certainly much avant garde classical music does similar things - but nowhere have I heard it done with such powerful, jaw dropping intensity as here, nor with such evocative use of sounds, combined in ways that surely no one else would ever have thought would work so well. It comes together to produce an overwhelming impact, and you probably need to be in the right sort of space, emotionally, to be able to withstand its force. This music needs to be played loudly, and in the dark. It's nighmarish stuff - but then nightmares are part of life, too, after all.