I've been waiting for one of these to start! (thought perhaps Scott was too Genius vs the Scenius that most here appreciate...)
Its all good, especially all the stuff post nite-flights... He's probably my single favourite musician, mainly for the way he interrogates the idea of "Song" and "lyric" so rigorously-- reading "Rip It Up & Start Again" the stuff on Scritti about deconstructed self-interrogating lyrics with "aporia" and the like reminded me a lot of late-era Scott stuff, but to my mind Walker does it better and investigates more interesting areas... His late era work is almost like attempts to write songs about things that cannot be effectively written about (ie- vast inhuman events and political protest- but done in a way which isn't cringeworthy or so overly obvious that they become laughable...)
Tilt is probably his best album, as the balance between "songfulness" and obscure noise-making is kept quite masterfully, with "Patriot (A Single)" the obvious standout (allegedly about the iraq war, altho the only clue really is that it begins and ends with the fragmented date January 17, 1991, the date on which the bombing of Iraq began... but the delicate almost Mahler like string harmonies contrast well with the carefully veiled lyric of horror... quite an informative reading of Tilt can be found here...
http://www.chrisconnelly.com/interact/boards/viewtopic.php?t=161 I don't agree with all of it, but a lot of it certainly gives good backgrounds to some of the more obscure references...
The new album "The Drift" is out on Monday (I think) I managed to track down a leak about a month ago...
If people thought Tilt was hard stuff, this is built out of the same ideas (vast expanses of abyss with just that voice to guide you through then short bursts of bellowing rupture) but far more offensive and aggressive and absurd than before.
On Tilt and Climate of Hunter and the Niteflites tracks there was at least some hint of the easy listening merchant of before, but twisted in a Lynchian way so that it became subverted in its new terrain, but here there is basically none of that, all transformed into noise rock, Penderaki like queasy stasis, and insane tableaux. Even on Tilt there was "The Patriot" and "Farmer in the City" lush songlike songs, albeit of a bizzaro hue.
Differences from Tilt--- less songy, more operatic, less heterogenous from song to song, the vocabulary remains the same across the album--- baritone guitars/atonal acoustic guitars, string dischords and Iannis Xenakis like glissandi, with lots of musique concrete/improv like disturbing sound effects- is that really a donkey braying or some kind of brass instrument on "Jolson and Jones"...? On Psoriatic is that a giant pee rolling around? Is that sawing of wood in the middle 8? There's far less tonal and chordal segments as well, rather stretches of effects and obscure instruments beating out regular rhythms...
Singing remarkably for a 63 yr old as effortlessly as ever- genuinely impressive...sounds just as good vocally as 11 years ago...
The comments that it was his rockingest album are accurate, not to the extent that he uses lots of guitars or verse/chorus structures... rather that its aggressive and pounding in parts in a way that his stuff hasn't been in the past... but really it sounds like a single piece in movements, almost a diseased cabaret or an ultra-avant garde opera of modern cruelty. It immediately renders all Goth/Industrial as frightening as a care-bears
annual sing-along...
Its immense and incredibly truculent- a libretto/lyric sheet really feels ESSENTIAL in order to make any headway with some of the pieces... makes even plainer the idea that he's often singing in different characters within the same song, different angles on the thing described..some lyrics already stick out .... "anthrax Jesus, sack of feet", "nose holes caked in black cocaine..." "don't think it hasn't been fun, cos it hasn't..." "polish the fork and stick the fork in him", "waddles into the afternoon, look into its eyes, it will look into your eyes......", "and everything within reach." And the little tv news sample at the beginning of Buzzers... "Caligula proclaimed his horse senator, but his horse never took his seat"