Author: JB Mellin
I’d like to begin this article in a way that none of my articles have before: with a riddle.
What do Radiohead, David Bowie, Panda Bear, and Lou Reed have in common?
The answer? A love of Scott Walker.
Born Noel Scott Engels in Ohio at the height of US involvement in World War II, Engels was ushered into the entertainment business by his mother at a young age and acted in several Broadway plays with great success. Enamored with show business but specifically its music, Engels moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the industry and quickly found jobs doing session work as a bassist around LA.
Not long after becoming an LA transplant, Engels joined a group with two other talented musicians: John Maus (no, not the Hey Moon guy, I made sure) and Gary Leeds. Maus was using a fake ID at the time to perform under the name of John Walker, and thus the Walker Brothers were born.
After reaching incredible stardom as a teenybopper band (the Walker Brothers official fanclub actually had more members than the Beatles fan club at one point) Engels (who I will now call Scott or Walker) became dissatisfied with the band and all of the fame and responsibility that it carried. By 1967, Scott had essentially separated from the group to focus on his own recordings and music.
It was this year that he began his most famous and highly-regarded run of records, all of which began with his name. Scott came out in 1967, Scott 2 in 1968, and finally Scott 3 and Scott 4 in 1969. Each begets a listen (if you’re interested), but if you don’t feel like sifting through hours of chamber instrumentation and baritone vocals for some reason, I’d focus on Scott 3 or Scott 4.
Walker has a very over-the-top baritone which, like you might imagine, creates for some emotional music. Combining this with Walker’s Carver-esque approach to writing lyrics, you get a lot of deceptively simple songs that read like real poetry. One of my personal favorites Copenhagen, off of Scott 3, is a beautiful ballad about the wonder and excitement that comes along with moving into a brand-new, unfamiliar city:
Copenhagen, you’re the end/ Gone and made me child again/ Warmed my feet beneath cold sheets/ Dyed my hair with your sunny streets.
Doesn’t it just make you wanna move to Copenhagen?
Of course, this exuberant and wonder-filled Scott doesn’t exactly define him as an artist. Many of his songs, like I mentioned before, are moody and brooding, being about relationships or more specifically, break-ups. The iconic Walker break-up song has got to be If You Go Away, filled with dramatic string flourishes that pair incredibly with Walker’s mournful vocals.
For what good is love without loving you?/ Can I tell you now, as you turn to go/ I’ll be dying slowly, to the next hello/
It’s pretty dramatic stuff, and serves as a great barometer for your very own Scott tolerance. If you like it, wonderful, I have more to tell you about. If not, I also understand. With that said, these four albums are incredible in nearly every way – songwriting, arrangements, and then obviously his magnificent voice (duh). They also stand incredibly tall for Walker as an artist because, well, after these four albums, he got pretty weird. Like, very weird.
With the exception of ‘Til the Band Comes In in 1970, Walker’s discography post Scott 1-4 was defined by an increasing interest in experimental artists and genres. His 1984 album, Climate of Hunters, is about as close to a dance album as Walker ever came, but calling it a dance album doesn’t really make sense. The instrumentation points to it being a sort of eerie foray into disco music, but Scott gets ghoulish fairly quickly not only with his vocal deliveries but also his lyrics, like in his song Rawhide:
It is losing its shape/ Losing its shape/ As the heat in your hands/ Carve the muscle away
Not exactly lyrics you might hear from Donna Summer.
Walker continued to innovate and expand what he could do with his voice as an instrument, and the feelings it could produce. He expanded into avant-garde territory with his 1995 album Tilt (which was highly regarded by one of my personal favorite artists, Lou Reed) which was lauded for its highly textural sound design and sampling, mixed in with Scott’s increasingly esoteric and disturbing lyrics. Then came The Drift in 2006, which, according to Mikael Åkerfeldt of the prog-metal band Opeth, is “quite extreme and terrifying.” You get the idea.
Bish Bosch in 2012 contained many of the same disturbing themes and motifs of The Drift and Tilt, as Scott Walker himself considered it the “final installment” of the trilogy. Lyrics of castration and violence run rampant alongside blips of harsh noise, Christmas-themed melodies and sleigh bells?, abrasive guitars, and just weird shit in general. It’s pretty harrowing and difficult to listen to, but if you’re already smitten I’d definitely give at least one of these three a try.
Besides a gorgeous soundtrack written and orchestrated for an indie film, Walker’s last album was with drone/experimental metal band (and Seattle natives!) Sunn O))). It’s a beautiful, intense and noisy project, often punctuated by piercing operatic vocals from Walker. The best track by far (in my opinion) is Brando, a song reflecting on the great actor’s legacy of violence.
The track is intense, and it’s nine minutes:
Scott’s ability to write and create incredibly moving love songs alongside weird, harrowing experimental pieces really cements him as one of the greats for me. Seeing an artist drastically evolve their tastes and sound over the course of their career while keeping it great is, in my opinion, the sign of a true artist. After all, who else could make a song about neo-Stalinists and then turn around and make one of the best love songs of the 20th century?
JB Mellin | the Old Man’s back again | KXSU Senior Music Editor