Scott Walker

Milestone (fig.): an event that marks a fundamental stage in the historical development of something. Let's say it straight away: by that definition, the presence of a record like this one in a column titled "milestones" might seem at best curious, if not downright incongruous.

Indeed, "Tilt", the work released in 1995 by Scott Walker, feels less and less like a milestone, less like a stop along a path, and more and more, as time goes by, like a dead-end track — a point beyond which one simply cannot proceed.

There are works which, though made within a specific field, and though built from "signs" and "symbols" that can be individually deciphered and placed in context, still manage to exist in a category all their own, appearing as an isolated creation, bound indissolubly and exclusively to its author, and of such scope that it concedes nothing to any label or scene. Well, "Tilt" is one of these works.

When the record came out, Scott Walker (real name: Noel Scott Engel) was known almost exclusively to insiders and enthusiastic fellow musicians — people of the calibre of Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp — who kept his memory alive without, however, being able to do anything to restore him to the visibility he deserved. And to think his first steps had gone in the opposite direction, marked by considerable success, a success squandered over time due to a moody character unwilling to compromise on anything.

His first musical steps date back to the late Fifties, but his first real breakthrough came with the formation (1964) of the Walker Brothers, a sort of proto-boy-band devoted to Spectorian pop. Afterwards, and right up until the end of the Sixties, Scott Walker would release a series of solo records of orchestral pop that grew ever more complex and tormented, where one can hear the strong influence — unusual for an American artist — of chansonnier poets like Jacques Brel, whom he also paid tribute to with extraordinary covers, while his singing drew on the crooner style of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. These solo records, each more beautiful, convincing and personal than the last, came out under the names "Scott", "Scott 2", "Scott 3" and... that's right, "Scott 4". The latter closed the first chapter of his career in 1969. The Seventies, by contrast, were Scott's purgatory: he imploded into a total rejection of spotlights and sequins, sank into alcohol, was gripped by severe depression, and his output fell below his recognised standard; also worth noting is a brief, one-off reunion of the aforementioned Walker Brothers. The Eighties saw the release of just one album, "Climate Of Hunter", which already showed signs of a musical elsewhere, laying the groundwork for the next record, which would arrive "only" eleven years later. For more on Scott Walker's career, it's worth pointing to a recent, splendid five-CD collection, "Five Easy Pieces", which explores in thorough and orderly fashion the whole spectrum of the man's musical and personal evolution.

But we were talking about "Tilt".

The distinguishing mark of "Tilt" is that Scott Walker sings in a baritone, anguished, vibrato-laden tone worthy of a refined night-club crooner, or a white soulman. But the music underpinning these nine tracks is a kind of expressionist nightmare that in several places borders on total dissonance and atonality — at times with no melodic progression whatsoever, at others with an unsettling solemnity, and always with an overpowering assertion of isolation and torment. The result is something never heard before, and probably never to be repeated.

If it's true that a record or a book should never be judged by its cover, it's also true that in this case the cover itself offers an important clue for decoding the content. The chosen image is genuinely unsettling: a magmatic whirlpool (it looks like liquid tar, black lava) from which details struggle to emerge — a hand, an eye, little else. The booklet is spare and austere: out of the black emerge a few grainy black-and-white images, and the lyrics to the songs... let's say to the pieces, since "songs" is hardly the right word.

The album opens with a low note of strings and the entrance of the voice, producing immediate emotion and involvement, before a wonderful flowering of violin harmony. "Farmer In The City" is an astonishing secular prayer in memory of Pasolini, and at the same time something of a red herring: from here on, the record follows different and even more demanding paths, with the only guide being Scott Walker's incredible voice. The following track, "The Cockfighter", after an opening of delirious background voices and distant clangs, plunges the listener into a din of industrial percussion. The piece unfolds amid piercing horn shrieks, dry drumming that follows the voice's narration — here possessed and relentless — and a great emptiness that finally overwhelms the listener: what just happened? What did I just listen to?

"The Cockfighter" is the first real entry point into the record's atmosphere, a black, viscous sea (remember the cover?) where it's hard to move, and even harder to try to grasp, to understand the meaning of the record... From this point on, we're in the maelstrom, fully immersed in a succession of tracks that take the shape of dark, black rooms, where at first you're lost, groping around blindly. After a period of adjustment, though, comes the reward: the rooms emerge from the darkness rich with detail, the pathos scattered generously throughout reveals itself in all its richness, and the orchestral arrangements, together with the dry drums and the piercing guitar (the production made sure the sounds came out sharp, clear and ringing), form an unprecedented and lavish backdrop that pushes the drama of Scott's sung notes to its fullest.

The listen continues with “Bouncer See Bouncer…”, a slow declamation over a pulsing mechanical beat and clattering metallic noise. Halfway through, the song opens up into an interlude of almost angelic lyricism, before shutting itself back into the unspeakable torments of its demiurge. In this sense, “Bouncer…” is the most representative track of the album's overall mood: it pairs industrial sonics with soulful, almost tenor-like vocals, and further disorients the listener with interludes and devices that tear to shreds any presumed logic of song construction. Put this way, one might imagine an experimental and forbidding record, but to avoid drowning and going under, it's enough to surrender to the passion with which the voice — for which, ultimately, no adjective in the world would suffice — wraps around the senses and draws us into intimate, and at the same time untranslatable, dramas.

And so it continues, in a uniform atmosphere from which, little by little, the distinctive traits of each track emerge like tremors: in “Manhattan”, it's the organ that erects an epic wall, to which Scott adds a voice chasing ever more powerful notes. The questions Scott poses here find their answer in the guitar's piercing notes, while the drums constantly track the swells and silences left by the voice. Meanwhile, “Face On A Breast” offers a lunar whistle that pushes its way over the guitar's stretched, searing chords. Another standout is “Bolivia '95”, where the guitar sketches out a vaguely retro, dark motif, then everything changes, and the vocal gains weight over an off-beat rhythm, before returning to the initial motif, “Lemon Bloody Cola”… Walker's dark irony comes through clearly in “Patriot (A Single)”, an eight-and-a-half-minute monstre with a lyric that includes gems like “The good news/you cannot refuse/The bad news/is there is no news”. Here the surprise twist, amid the liturgical, hieratic pacing, is the flute interlude that stages a little contemporary-opera theatre.

The album closes with “Tilt” and “Rosary”. The former is, on the surface, very much a “rock song”, in that the music follows the conventions of a sort of mid-tempo ballad — except by this point the journey we've taken has carried us far, far away from conventional musical expression, leaving us somewhere around the Moon or thereabouts… “Rosary” sounds as if he sang it at some promotional TV appearance, head down, utterly estranged from the context. Amid moans and wordless vocalizing, the torment pierces through the notes, twisting and turning, and “I've got to go, I've got to go”…

The references to the moon (or to distant planets) are no accident: the overriding impression “Tilt” gives is indeed one of notes and voice arriving from interstellar distances, aided by the visionary nature of the lyrics — an alien birth, in short.

A record to be listened to alone, forbidding and impenetrable, a genuine goldmine of hidden emotions, to be savoured sparingly and appreciated like a bottle of fine wine. Yet every time you listen, new worlds open up to our sensibility. A monument to be sullied with our senses, a black sea to lose yourself in… Pure mercurial poetry, born where extreme cold turns in an instant into white heat. Fire and ice inextricably bound together. All this is “Tilt”.

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14/11/2006