The Rolling Stones のように60歳以上のミュージシャンが好きなわけではないけれど、私のMusic Lifeの中で絶対にはずしていけないのは Scott Walker。
実際、姉の影響で小学生低学年で Walker Brothers を聞き始め、洋楽好きとなり、The Rolling Stones の"Jumping Jack Flash" をモノクロで見てロック・ファンになったのでしょうがないでしょう。
さて、そのScottの新作 The Drift の話。
向こうの2チャネルのようなスレッドで展開されている5月にでたアルバム (日本では来週なのか・・) をCDでようやくイギリスから入手。
+++++
New York Times review:
Scott Walker
"The Drift"
(4AD)
Scott Walker has a voice made for drama: a long-breathed baritone with a cultivated vibrato that sounds both virile and ghostly. It made him a pop star when he proclaimed a monumentally orchestrated despair in the 1966 Walker Brothers hit "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." He moved from Los Angeles to London, where the Walker Brothers — not his brothers and not his last name, Engel — became pop idols for a few years. There he embarked on his own increasingly idiosyncratic songwriting career: from pop-rock to singing Jacques Brel to what can only, and incompletely, be called art songs.
"The Drift" is his first album since "Tilt" in 1995, and like "Tilt" it's remote from anything usually called rock or pop. The electric guitar and drumbeat disappear midway through the first song, "Cossacks Are," and rarely return. Most of the songs are slow, yet utterly devoid of the comfort of ballads. Dissonant orchestral strings appear and disappear, swelling or muttering or shivering high overhead. Lone instruments, like a fluegelhorn or a slide guitar, loom up out of silence. Electronic sounds lurk in dim recesses.
Amid them Mr. Walker croons grim, cryptic tidings: visions of death, mutilation, sorrow and destruction. "Jesse," which he has described as his song about 9/11, is also about Elvis Presley's stillborn twin; it starts with a barely recognizable hint of "Jailhouse Rock" and ends with Mr. Walker singing, completely unaccompanied, "I'm the only one left alive."
In "Hand Me Ups" he imagines how it feels to be crucified; the backup includes an Arabic-inflected voice, a giant bass saxophone called a tubax, a screaming woman and, when he sings, "Its audience is waiting," a lone rhythmic handclap. When he contemplates murder in "Jolson and Jones," he turns the word "curare" into something like a refrain.
If Mr. Walker has any rock counterpart, it would be the Trent Reznor who made Nine Inch Nails' "Fragile"; Mr. Walker wants his complex studio textures "played at high volume," say the liner notes. But his songs are equally close to the somber desolation of Schubert lieder like "Die Winterreise," and in their oblique way are informed as much by history and politics as by private reflections.
"The Drift" sets out only to follow its own obsessions; it's both lush and austere, utterly personal and often Delphic in its impenetrability. Mr. Walker clearly set out to please no one but himself, but his threnodies are as compelling as they are disquieting. JON PARELES
+++++
Elvis Dreams of 9/11
And other brilliantly strange concoctions from the elusive pop genius Scott Walker.
というレビューから読み取れるかどうかはわからないけど、20代前半で「mature」な歌声を持ってしまった早熟なシンガーはどんどん深い世界に言っているように見えます。でもね。あの声質が衰えない限りやっぱり
his threnodies are as compelling as they are disquieting
(彼の挽歌はそれが平静を乱しているのと同じくらい無視できません。)
あぁ、英語がもっと堪能になりたい・・・
実際、姉の影響で小学生低学年で Walker Brothers を聞き始め、洋楽好きとなり、The Rolling Stones の"Jumping Jack Flash" をモノクロで見てロック・ファンになったのでしょうがないでしょう。
さて、そのScottの新作 The Drift の話。
向こうの2チャネルのようなスレッドで展開されている5月にでたアルバム (日本では来週なのか・・) をCDでようやくイギリスから入手。
+++++
New York Times review:
Scott Walker
"The Drift"
(4AD)
Scott Walker has a voice made for drama: a long-breathed baritone with a cultivated vibrato that sounds both virile and ghostly. It made him a pop star when he proclaimed a monumentally orchestrated despair in the 1966 Walker Brothers hit "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." He moved from Los Angeles to London, where the Walker Brothers — not his brothers and not his last name, Engel — became pop idols for a few years. There he embarked on his own increasingly idiosyncratic songwriting career: from pop-rock to singing Jacques Brel to what can only, and incompletely, be called art songs.
"The Drift" is his first album since "Tilt" in 1995, and like "Tilt" it's remote from anything usually called rock or pop. The electric guitar and drumbeat disappear midway through the first song, "Cossacks Are," and rarely return. Most of the songs are slow, yet utterly devoid of the comfort of ballads. Dissonant orchestral strings appear and disappear, swelling or muttering or shivering high overhead. Lone instruments, like a fluegelhorn or a slide guitar, loom up out of silence. Electronic sounds lurk in dim recesses.
Amid them Mr. Walker croons grim, cryptic tidings: visions of death, mutilation, sorrow and destruction. "Jesse," which he has described as his song about 9/11, is also about Elvis Presley's stillborn twin; it starts with a barely recognizable hint of "Jailhouse Rock" and ends with Mr. Walker singing, completely unaccompanied, "I'm the only one left alive."
In "Hand Me Ups" he imagines how it feels to be crucified; the backup includes an Arabic-inflected voice, a giant bass saxophone called a tubax, a screaming woman and, when he sings, "Its audience is waiting," a lone rhythmic handclap. When he contemplates murder in "Jolson and Jones," he turns the word "curare" into something like a refrain.
If Mr. Walker has any rock counterpart, it would be the Trent Reznor who made Nine Inch Nails' "Fragile"; Mr. Walker wants his complex studio textures "played at high volume," say the liner notes. But his songs are equally close to the somber desolation of Schubert lieder like "Die Winterreise," and in their oblique way are informed as much by history and politics as by private reflections.
"The Drift" sets out only to follow its own obsessions; it's both lush and austere, utterly personal and often Delphic in its impenetrability. Mr. Walker clearly set out to please no one but himself, but his threnodies are as compelling as they are disquieting. JON PARELES
+++++
Elvis Dreams of 9/11
And other brilliantly strange concoctions from the elusive pop genius Scott Walker.
というレビューから読み取れるかどうかはわからないけど、20代前半で「mature」な歌声を持ってしまった早熟なシンガーはどんどん深い世界に言っているように見えます。でもね。あの声質が衰えない限りやっぱり
his threnodies are as compelling as they are disquieting
(彼の挽歌はそれが平静を乱しているのと同じくらい無視できません。)
あぁ、英語がもっと堪能になりたい・・・
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