supervillain.

Mesmo Delivery has a very strange aspect to it, aside from it being a proper exploitation comic and  lot of what makes it amazing is gut-level reactions in the reader. At the same time, its a comic about being an artist. When the panel above pops up towards the end of the book, after one of the two leads Sangreco has spent the entire story talking about art and Elvis and showmanship, it takes on  larger significance. The line recalls one of my favorite Walken line readings - ”A man can be an artist… in anything, food, whatever. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece”. Rafael Grampa has been compared to Frank Quitely, Paul Pope, and Geoff Darrow. His work doesn’t so much as share visual similarities with those artists (while there are some), as it is a way to say that Grampa has an idiosyncratic  approach to movement, page design, and character design. In short, Rafael Grampa is a guy who’s showing up with a complete worldview, like those guys. When even the best comics artists take years of middling work to get to that point, it’s something that needs to be mentioned. This is the comics of a new voice, and rarer still, its a book that entertains ideas about what it means to be an artist.

Of  course, this is just the first thing that Grampa has released in the US, and it’s a re-release at that. I couldn’t tell you if he has a large back catalog of work where he banged his style into what it is or if this is arriving fully-formed as a debut comic. I don’t think it matters. The comic is an artists showcase, too – to some extent it’s Rafael Grampa showing off. Actually in all extents, this is some show-off comics. This is a gauntlet being thrown down, Stooges debut performance, Nasty Nas debut album shit. This is angry young man comics, showing how he can do this and they can’t. And it works. It’s legitimately an announcement of Rafael Grampa’s name being on something is automatically worth your dime.

Mesmo Delivery is an exploitation comic. There isn’t a character arc involved here, there isn’t even a morality tale, or an examination of behavior. The innate nature of exploitation film, comics, etc. in their long history, is that you gravitate to them for the strange artistry that trash can appear in the best trash. The genre cinema of the world, where trash can turn into greatness from scene to scene, the EC comics that had some of the best comics artists drawing stories of guys drowning. Either that, or you gravitate to it because you want to see the reprehensible, the violent, the screwed up. Those competing notions exist in Mesmo Delivery, sometimes in the same moment.  The story – a Twilight Zone meets Peckinpah riff about a truck stop: a fight between two guys – one comically huge and one with a screw-on oversized Warner Bros. fist, an Elvis-listening martial arts assassin, a faceless and mysterious boss giving ominous orders – it’s nothing that immediately grabs. But then again, stories like this are always about execution. Which of course is the reason you buy comics for the art – the dream sequence page, the up-angle of the girl pissing herself, the shot of the devil, the inside-the-mouth zoom-in and cutaway, the lilting way the Elvis lyrics move across the page – this is the first time you can see anything like this and he knows it.

But for all the exploitation fireworks going on in this book, all the look-at-what-I-can-do bravura skill here, there is something more going on in Mesmo Delivery, and it has to do with being an artist. There is the narrative sophistication of the best Twilight Zones (ie the Matheson ones) here. It’s not a twist or a tragedy, but a shift from one sense of story to another – a 70s trucker fight comic into a mordant story of a killer who feels undervalued. The two leads, Rufo and Sangreco, only interact at the beginning and end of the story. The shift between the two modes is actually tied to Rufo being knocked out, and Sangreco acting while he knows Rufo won’t know about it. By doing this, the way the book treats protagonists as antithetical, isn’t the kind of thing you’re expecting from exploitation. Sangreco’s talk about himself as an artist – I’m not about to say thats Grampa himself talking, but there is always something interesting in art about artists. The uncomfortable nature about talking what you do can yield some interesting results. The killer-as-artist, that’s not new. Thats an idea running pretty deep in every culture. Sangreco’s dialog at the start of the book, where he says he’s a better Elvis, and he gets called a “cheap-ass imitation”, it hits home and he doesn’t show it.  Sangreco’s art is something he has to keep hidden to survive, because that art, as Christopher Walken told us, is killing. He feels like a performer, and the way he talks to the bartender is that of an artist yearning to be recognized. In a riff on the old, the bartender-got-it-the-worst scene in all these stories, the bartender tells Sangreco he didn’t see anything. To him, it shows that even when he does his best, it’s never going to be seen for the art it is. A true artist does what he can, not to show off the story says. The contradiction is that Mesmo Delivery is the kind of showcase that only an artist with these inclinations could possibly pull off. Maybe it’s only with that contradiction that exploitation can truly be art, or maybe it’s just skill and nothing else matters.

Either way, this does what it should do and more.

David Wolkin, I blame you. (Please ignore the fact that this would be the longest film festival ever).

This is one of the nerdiest things I’ve ever done, but we all think about stuff like this, I’m just dorky enough to type it out.

- – - – - -

Monday – MIND OF A KILLER
For a Few Dollars More directed by Sergio Leone
High and Low directed by Akira Kurosawa

Tuesday – IDIOTS
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy directed by Adam McKay
The Fortune Cookie directed by Billy Wilder

Wednesday – TORTURE PORN
Devil’s Rejects directed by Rob Zombie
Ichi The Killer directed by Takashi Miike

Thursday – SCORSESE
After Hours directed by Martin Scorsese
Last Temptation of Christ directed by Martin Scorsese

Friday – BLOOD ON THE WALLS
Evil Dead 2 directed by Sam Raimi
Tokyo Drifter directed by Seijun Suzuki

Saturday – MASTERPIECE THEATER
A Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick
There Will Be Blood directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Sunday – EPICS
King of New York directed by Abel Ferrara
Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa

Monday – ZEN PULP
Collateral directed by Michael Mann
Limits of Control directed by Jim Jarmusch

Tuesday – GONZO
Crank 2 directed by Neveldine/Taylor
Mr. Freedom directed by William Klein

Wednesday – CHASES
Ronin directed by John Frankenheimer
Bullit directed by Peter Yates

Thursday – CITIES
Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott
La Haine directed by Matthieu Kassovitz

Friday – BASTARDS
The Prestige directed by Chris Nolan
The Driver directed by Walter Hill

Saturday – SCIENCE FICTION
5th Element directed by Luc Besson
Alphaville directed by Jean Luc Godard

Sunday – CON MEN
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels directed by Frank Oz
Royal Tenenbaums directed by Wes Anderson

Monday – LIFE OF THE MIND
The Tenant directed by Roman Polanski
Barton Fink directed by the Coen Bros

Tuesday – COMICS
Castle of Cagliostro directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Barbarella directed by Roger Vadim

Wednesday – GUNFIGHTS AND HOMOEROTICISM
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang directed by Shane Black
Hard Boiled directed by John Woo

Thursday – SCIFI ACTION SATIRE
Robocop directed by Paul Verhoeven
Scanners directed by David Cronenberg

Friday – PHILOSOPHY
O Brother Where Art Thou directed by the Coen Bros
Repo Man directed by Alex Cox

Saturday – GORE
TRIPLE FEATURE
American Werewolf in London directed by John Landis
The Thing directed by John Carpenter
Tenebre directed by Dario Argento

Sunday – MEMORY AND THE MOMENT
TRIPLE FEATURE
The Limey directed by Steven Soderbergh
Point Blank directed by John Boorman
The Conversation directed by Francis Ford Coppola

- – -

This article originally appeared in Andrew Hickey’s PEP! print-on-demand magazine, the second issue of which should be out soon. Thanks again, for the opportunity, Andrew. There is also a short preamble to this piece I wrote in February -

“A personal message of the self of some kind. Because ultimately your work is yourself.” So the PDF version of Andrew Hickey’s magazine PEP! is live, and the print-on-demand version of it will be up two weeks from now. I’ve got a pretty large article in it, which is a piece on Scott Walker. It’s called “Scott Walker Is God”, which was the thing that ate my brain last November/December while I was working on it. I’ve got to thank Andrew for letting me do the piece the way I did (kind of without telling him about it except for the topic) as wrote about Walker’s career in the style of his career – so the piece starts off very conventional magazine article and the further along into Walker’s career I tried to abstract it as much as possible, just fixating on details and fragments at the expense of clarity, the way he does. I don’t know if that conceit works, but that was the original idea. The piece was very influenced by the fact that I listened to Scott Walker for months on end while working on a huge project, and got lost in his headspace for a while. Walker isn’t like any other musician that I’ll go on long runs of only listening them – not like Bowie or the Wu Tang Clan or Morricone. Where those artist are sonic troughs – new perspectives on the world, new angles to see everything; Walker’s body of work is a vast expanse of darkness, urging you to chase after stray voices off in the distance. “Because I have a very nightmarish imagination. I’ve had very bad dreams all my life and things. So everything in my world is big. It’s way out of proportion.”

- – -

THE OLD MAN’S BACK AGAIN

The famous image of “Clapton is God” scrawled on a garage somewhere sticks with anyone who knows anything about music. Partly because it’s just so iconic because you can’t say there wasn’t a time where whoever wrote that might have had a point to argue. Partly because whoever wrote was so sure they had to tell the world. Partly because how much Clapton has invalidated it, turned into lifestyle music, written pablum about his dead child that is so saccharine and empty some musicians actually took it as a challenge to see how much further they could push it. Clapton sure as fuck isn’t god, we know that now. He’s just some guy who played guitar really well in an okay band, then a great band, then another. He was the best on his instrument, equally mastering it on a technical and personal level. He was someone who found a way to speak through his instrument, maybe. He might have just been a guitar player who was better than Harrison but worse than Hendrix. Then slowly sank into his position as an old man who occasionally puts out a blues cover album once a decade. It’s music I buy my dad for christmas. It’s fucking lifestyle music, and the galvanizing force of the man in his twenties might as well not even existed if we didn’t have that image in our heads of “Clapton is God”.

For a while there, you heard people say the same thing about DJ Shadow. And I agreed with them, I mean listen to the way the beat is constructed in “Blood on the Motorway” and tell me that there’s someone better at doing what he does in that same way, that punch your heart that much. Shadow was a man behind a sampler who could break your heart, personality and soul shining through the technical mastery. In fact they might have been one and the same. The problem was that within three albums and a singles/ b-sides comp, Shadow had the urge to rewrite his public persona as a master of sample-based beatmaking – maybe the only one that truly learned from DJ Premier’s high standard example. Shadow intentionally dodged the public perception of him, releasing an album called the Outsider where he did everything but what his audience wanted from him. Some of it was terrible, some of it sounded rushed or incomplete, or even boring. But some of it – such as the collaboration with David Banner, “Seeing Thangs” – was revelatory. Maybe he painted himself into a corner. But the idea of Shadow being God is kind of a ridiculous statement now and I couldn’t tell you why other than he’s kind of destroyed that image himself. Sure, this man could improve on Axelrod, could take John Carpenter dialog clips and single-note Bjork keyboard riffs, obscure jazz and prog from the far-flung corners of Europe and turn it into transcendent cohesive songs. The only dj who appeared in Scratch who refused to be shown performing. But really he’s a guy who’s thinking of how he’s perceived, who’s more interested in doing something different than doing something excellent. It’s interesting, and it surely hasn’t discounted him as a great artist. But calling the guy God is almost as laughable as Clapton.

Rakim has called himself “the god emcee” and with good reason, Rakim is to rap music what Alan Moore is to superhero comics, someone who introduced a new level of complexity to an art form that wasn’t expecting it. Rakim would break his lines into fragments, creating internal rhyme in world where the biggest precedent was singsong end-rhymes. Rakim also defined a confidence that few could even fathom before he showed up. Rakim, it’s believable, it’s understandable that he could be called the god emcee. Sure, he isn’t as good as he was when he was with Eric B. and his rhymes are a little too self-righteous these days but he’s still the best that ever did it, right? I find it interesting that when you hear the phrase “X is God” those are the three musicians that spring right to mind. I’m sure that it’s been said a myriad of times, about whoevers speaking’s favorite band usually. It’s kind of a meaningless phrase. But I have found myself saying “Scott Walker is God”, and I feel like when I say it, it’s not hero worship. Scott Walker, and his long, confounding career, can’t be qualified in the same way as many other artists.

YOU COULD EASILY PICTURE THIS IN THE CURRENT TOP TEN

Scott Walker is one of the Old Gods, in the Jack Kirby parlance. In the opening of Stephen Kijak’s documentary 30TH CENTURY MAN he’s compared to Orpheus, gone to the underworld, returned permanently damaged. Scott Walker is the last man standing on a barren landscape, screaming into the darkness. Trapped inside his own head. The noises keep getting louder and his fists are all bloody from pounding them on the ground. Scott Walker is the last moral voice of humanity, a madman confessing his crimes, a sadist and collaborator telling you his crimes in a south American bar somewhere ten years after the war ended, an expat living in exile explaining to you why Europeans will never understand American culture. He’s a weeping husband at a crime scene. A prisoner who wide-eyed never raises his voice above a quiet drawl. He’s the last of the old crooners, he’s the only true artist left singing pop songs. He’s a singer who disappeared for decades only to come back to release one album a decade, each more stark and horrifying than the next, going from love standards to Jaque Brel covers to existential originals drowned in strings to ballads from the perspective of torturers to opaque saxaphone-laden slow motion surrealism to abrasive paens to the dead American mythos to now. Now, where a song is just as likely to be about the disinterring of the body of Claretta Petacci or an expressionist play-by-play of a disease spreading across a city. He’s a fringe weirdo who makes opera for people who hate opera, a man atoning for his pop star past, writing his way out with violence-imbued acts of contrition, song by song. He’s an autodidact and a showbiz brat, a man who went to a monastery not to get away from the world but to learn gregorian chant. He’s a recluse, spending 6 years to record a song that’s ten minutes long and which makes no sense. He is one of the New Gods, impossible to reduce to a simple description – - having no real peers in his art form, no clear line to draw his influences from, messilly inspiring swathes of musicians who are mostly British but largely dissimilar. At 66 he is a valid artist in a way that no one else in his art form – not even David Bowie or Brian Eno – could hope to claim. He is a name that’s mentioned in hallowed tones, held in a kind of awe by people who make records for a living. He’s a mess, and yet remarkably singular. He’s a man chronicling a world of constant nightmarish tension, yet he is not a fantasist. Scott Walker, to paraphrase another New God, IS.

EXCEPT WHEN IT BEGAN I WAS SO HAPPY I DIDN’T FEEL LIKE ME

He’s a voice in your head. The part that screams about the horror of the world while you sit in silence. There’s really two or three Scott Walkers – he’s not a chameleonic performer, not in the context of Dylan/Bowie public personality manipulation. He’s thankfully free of artifice, but there is “singer” Scott Walker and “writer” Scott Walker, possibly even segmenting the writer off into pre- and post- NITE FLIGHTS eras. Before he is a heroic voice of unadulterated emotion, backed by an army of string arrangements. After he is ever-increasingly a man alone, occasionally screaming over a cluster of percussion. But there is a melancholy and darkness in the heroism, and there is a strident tone to the voice of the lone man. The first Scott Walker song I had ever heard, “On Your Own Again” off Scott 4, is a gorgeous fragment of a ballad, a remembrance of a long broken relationship. Walker ambles his way through a year of his life, distracted by the chaos of the real world (“heroes died in subways”) before returning to how for a short time this romance took him out of himself. It’s about as close as we get to Walker on the early records, as personal as he’d ever allow.

“The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)” is maybe Walker’s greatest achievement in either era – - equally political, a character piece, a stunning arrangement, a vocal showcase – - it’s hard to see the Walker of Tilt writing something so directly incisive. Or so tuneful. The lyrics paint fragments of life under the new regime – moments of bread lines snaking through the streets, a woman weeping in the snow, a great arm reaching down from the sky, a young soldier unsure of the world around him. The arrangement is truly brilliant – bass clunking along in the left channel ontop of a distant delayed second voice, Walker repeating lines buried way down in the mix. The guitar and drums compressed into one rhythm track on the right. Layers of strings miles above the conventional instruments, slicing through the track when they need to, but also adding fullness along with a chorale. Walker’s voice is above even the strings, soaring and stentorian but lilting downward every few lines, denoting the weariness of the subject matter – he’s in combat with the strings in a way, they slide in and out of sync with him. The slowness of his voice on the song’s dark punchline (“his mother called him Ivan… then she died”) and then his strange scatting on the fade out – are indicators of theme as well as the level of control that Walker has had in his instrument.

SOMETHING ATTACKED THE EARTH LAST NIGHT WITH A KICK THAT MAN HABIT EYE

Across his entire career – Walker’s best work is about details. “It’s Raining Today” lives and dies on the throbbing bed of atonal strings that live under the song, for example. “Big Louise” crystallizes with the line “she’s a haunted house and her windows are broken”. Increasingly as time goes on, though, Walker begins to stop adding these details to conventional songs and begins making the details the focus of the work. NITE FLIGHTS marks a change in Walker’s lyrics – the first four songs on the last Walker Brothers LP are essentially a Scott Walker EP, the first of the long second stage of his career. The subject matter got darker, the voices are disguised and electronically processed – it’s worth noting that Scott Walker doesn’t sound like Scott Walker a lot of the time on Nite Flights. The echoing shouting of “DEAF DUMB BLIND DEAF DUMB BLIND” on “Fat Mama Kick” sounds like its coming from the other end of a tunnel while power tools are running, it’s sleazy bass groove seems completely alien, the kind of thing Orpheus would never deign to allow on his albums. “Shutout” is far too hurried and it’s guitars too piercing to be anything less than the frenetic spilling of words that Walker lets forth, paranoia mounting in each verse. His voice is equally detached and desperate, unsure of what to do next. The title track is easier, the most Walker Brothers song on the record, but the track itself is too spaced out, the lyrics too oblique. “The Electrician” is a languid, strange piece that concerns itself with the romantic aspects of torture – it’s also one of the most beautiful songs Walker has ever written. It is the demarcation point between the two Scott Walkers, embodying aspects of both – - horrifying subject matter, strings that are at times ambient walls of tension and at others gorgeous pastoral soundscapes conventional, almost classical instrumentation, the voice is coldly manipulated then gives way to warm and lush instrumental sections. If there is a before and after, here is the exact middle.

Released five years later, CLIMATE OF HUNTER is maybe the only record in Walker’s entire catalog that could be called dated, if only for the very specific sound of the production on many of the tracks. It is a minor complaint, but Walker’s body of work is largely timeless – even the very 60s production of Scott 1-4 has been referenced so much it’s now “classic”, because now that’s what good strings sound like. Climate is Walker’s most dreamlike record, sonically and lyrically – “the windows are ringing” is so gorgeous and evocative – perhaps it seems not to fit because Walker isn’t screaming into the blackness of his soul for 60 minutes straight. It’s looser, but these are still conventional songs, more conventional even than the caustic shards of pop songs on Nite Flights. There are moments where you can hear Bowie and Eno, or Tangerine Dream’s rich warm textures on “Sleepwalker’s Woman”, in the clouds of throbbing horns on “Six” that seems to happen independently of the rest of the song, that you can feel a largeness that seems to be missing on Climate. The closing record is too small – just southern-tinged barroom guitar – it’s the one time on his solo career Scott Walker is grasping for legitimacy in that horrible 90s comeback record way. But the lyrics are still Walker, concerned with bodies and night terrors. It’s the weakest of Walker’s “official”records, but really how relative is that?

I KISS HOLES FOR THE BULLETS

Then there’s TILT, which suffers only when held against THE DRIFT. It’s a masterwork, sonically singular – owing almost nothing to any other musician. It is Walker self-replicating, feeding off of nothing but his own ideas. Creating the music he hears in his head. They’re not songs, not in the same way that everything before it are songs. This becomes the template for the Drift as well, Walker’s voice is alone against immense arrangements. There is no melody to speak of. Walker often sounds on the brink of tears, overwhelmed. Other times he’s a narrator, one who is accusatory of his own story. Or complicit. Legitimately industrial percussion, walls of clattering machinery, shimmering rattle of mining equipment far in the distance, slow martial war drums – - the half of the songs which have percussion at all. Never are drums used as a basis for Walker to sing over. He is always a counterpoint, always removed by a layer or two. Walker’s lyrics have now become one with his voice, intonation and emphasis are the same thing as the words themselves. “You and me against the world” doesn’t quite have the same meaning without Walker’s desperation, the quiver in his pitched voice.

“Bouncer See Bouncer” sees Walker just close enough to a factory for all the noise to seep into his conversations, scratching pencil on paper as he speaks. Then the screams come in the distance, “spared I’ve been spared all the handles a body could handle”. The glimmer of light, the silence of the noise, is given to Walker’s loving description of boxing play-by-play is quieted and the hammering noise begins again, squeaking stress on a door somewhere. “Don’t play that song for me, you won’t play that song for me” – the voice stops and the factory sounds continue, the tape deteriorating towards the end before it is overtaken by the next song. The first two minutes of “The Cockfighter” is shuffled papers and Walker muttering unintelligibly, until we’re interspersed with the sounds from inside the factory, a cacophony of hammering drummers all playing in wave. “It’s a beautiful night. Garcia, a cigarette for the prisoner” a horn blaring a discordant as Walker compares this one to these over here, cycling high pitches in each of the stereo channels as Walker’s voice loops around us, low in the mix, his voice returns with the strings, talking about gambling markers and disease. Everything is fragments, he is never talking about what we think he’s talking about. In 30TH CENTURY MAN, he mentions that the songs aren’t meant to be taken too literally and that he finds an idea thats usually political and expands out to a more personal singular notion. Walker is an existentialist in a way that few are – he makes every aspect of life into a challenge of the self.

Tilt, as a whole, never settles on one idea for too long, or one emotion. It is not easy-listening, if anything its intent on creating anxiety. “Face on Breast” turns a whistle into a scream in the distance, it’s drums a racing pulse inside your head as you run, slowing down as your breathing gets heavier. “Patriot (a single)” begins with “see how they run”, conventionally built on Walker’s voice and strings blossoming into Ligeti-style cycles of strings echoing into nothing, then drops into Walker slurring syllables and a medieval wind a bras punctuating each pause. “The good news you cannot refuse, the bad news is that there is no news”, a phrase who’s meaning changes each time Walker says it, embodying an almost religious tone even. What is this song about? What are any of these songs about? Why this instrumentation? Why the digital flourish when he says “swirls and collects”? What is he trying to say?

The urge to question – “what does this song mean? what is this about?” is a wrong step – the better question is always what does this song make me feel? All of Tilt is meant to make your chest get tight and your head feel weightless, to try and sing along with Walker and be overtaken. To fixate on minor sonic manipulations and ignore the big picture. To let it wash over you at full volume. “Rosary” is the bleakest moment on Tilt, the shortest song, the most minimal. Just Scott’s voice and a guitar playing minor notes, too busy to be a proper rhythm. Nothing else. It’s a naked song, wailing as his voice gets louder. “But I’ve gotta quit” he says over and over, ending the record on an unfinished thought – leaving us hanging. What is this about? Does it matter? Tilt is Walker at his most impenetrable, his most unwelcoming. But he ends the album saying everything we need to know, showing us everything we need to see. “And I’ve gotta quit… and I’ve gotta quit”

WHERE DO THE SEWERS GO THEY GOTTA GO SOMEWHERE I KNOW THEY CAN’T EMPTY INTO THE SEA GOTTA GO SOMEWHERE

Walker’s two songs written for Ute Lemper’s PUNISHING KISS album, one of which only appeared on a Japanese import version of the album, are in a way the final product of Tilt. It is the same manner of production and composition, the same kind of lyrics, the same strange turns of phrase and building walls of sound from small sounds into massive constructs of epic noise. Is “Scope J” about human trafficking? A serial killer in a Russian town? Rubles and bootleggers populate the song, details are the only important thing in this woman’s world – “the dagger not the knife”, “never settling snow”, “long flowing ribbons again”. The way in which the choruses build – and they are choruses strangely enough – into massive towers of looping strings and repeating two-note guitar riffs as she screams at the top of her lungs is stunning. The way she cracks a smile nine minutes in as she says “she’s cut her to ribbons again”, laughing at the horror of the situation. “Lullaby (by-by-by)” is the rarity, the import-only track. It sounds like incidental music from a 70s science fiction show, it’s Night Gallery music. She whispers, intoning the voice of a snake oil salesman, a baptist preacher, a remedy man, a minstrel show. The long barren tone of a dead horn. The fucked up thing about this song is how close it comes to legitimate salvation, the rising heavenly strings straight out of Scott 2 as Lemper’s voice soars higher and higher and higher, brought down by the bitterness, the harsh realities of capitalism and a harmonium being played in the other room to the rattle of loose change. “Tonight my assistant will pass among you. His cap will be empty. Nonni nonni.” The song is in equal parts about salvation and commerce, about hucksters and saviors.

NOSE HOLES CAKED IN BLACK COCAINE

THE DRIFT, Walker’s latest album released in 2006, truly cements Walker’s focus on texture and detail over everything else. The record is essentially nothing but voice and atmosphere and sound effects, truly its the kind of record that has been foleyed as much as it’s been arranged. Jarvis Cocker told Walker that he liked The Drift better than Tilt because it sounds like a radio drama. It starts with a snarling guitar riff and drums that sound like hoofbeats. The first track “Cossacks Are” is about the morning paper, the Weegee photographs of the murder. The scaremongering of the war, as they’re charging in. Charging in the fields of white roses. It’s self-congratulatory, knowingly morbid in it’s humor. The Drift is the darkest of Walker’s albums but it’s also the funniest. The phrases “you could easily picture this in the current top ten” on Tilt or Climate. Or Walker complimenting a suit, a swanky suit.

“Clara”, a song that might be about the execution of Claretta Pettacci, who was Mussolini’s lover. It’s too long, too strange to just be about that. Running water, a woman’s voice, “dipped in blood in the moonlight, like what happened in America”, and we hear a thudding uneven percussion – which is actually a man punching a slab of pork in order to simulate bodies being shot and beaten. The song shifts to an impersonal-person narrative of Clara, occasionally slipping into second person. A kind of fascist LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, the feeling of being lost in a place you’ve known for year. Wafting through minor detail of the rooms, the mural on the blue vaulted ceiling, “his strange beliefs about the moon” – the music is a score, an embellishment. Locusts, the sound of the world outside and the staccato punching, grunting in frustration and we hear her voice “sometimes I feel like a swallow…”. Walker uses the metaphor of a bird trapped in an attic. The chaos, the horror, Walker’s description of the corpse. It drops to a whisper, a heron off in the distance, horror strings shudder to life – the pounding drum circle too low, as Walker intimates the act of freeing the bird from the attic as some kind of closure, but the very act itself is unsure.

AND I FELT THE NAIL DRIVING INTO MY FOOT, I FELT THE NAIL DRIVING INTO MY HAND

“Jesse” is the closest thing to a song on The Drift, and fittingly it’s sung as Elvis. To his dead twin. About 9/11. A guitar struggles to reach our ears through a muddy effect. Lynchian ambiences as Walker starts screaming and the strings rise. “A building left in the night” says so much more than anything explicit would have. The desperate way in which he sings “I’m the only one left alive” unaccompanied. “Jolson and Jones” turns into footsteps on cobblestone street, a limp towards us heard from a window. The violin seems increasingly strained. He screams “I’ll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway”, hears a flaw in a woman’s voice. The footsteps suddenly stop.

“Hand Me Ups” is an assault, drums upon drums, Arabic singing (though it could be a prayer), Walker screaming. When it stops, when we’re allowed to breathe, a saxophone straight out of a Tom Waits record replaces the noise, we’re given details of a murder by primitive means “Brain running down the long spear… from the wound in the eye hole” – it’s the music of missionaries being killed by cannibals, violin imitating a woman’s scream. Sex in the room above you, the pee pee soaked trousers, the audience is waiiiiiting. A zither. The torn mudded dress. A metallic tone, a sound that bends in the middle, like a buoy is the percussion on “Buzzers”, Walker. Cannibalism and whispers, he’s done boys. He’s done boys. “Psioratic” is a shell game, Walker starts speaking as a con man, his language still full of pathological argot “Bite the negro come on sucker” “jadajadajingjingjing”. “The Escape” is true terror, the kind of funny that serial killers laugh at. The kind of specificity, the rack focus of detail, the intelligent playfulness of wrong language (“The car in front follows the long way around”), the frenetic terror of grabbing someone and shaking them (“you and me against the world you and me against the world you and me against the world world about to end world about to end world about to end”), the tools of horror, the impotence and anger of the Donald Duck voice – a moment that is LITERALLY sublime, the drums thunking out the same beat once again.

“A Lover Loves” is the doppelganger of “Rosary” only without the raw emotion of the former. It’s once again just Scott Walker’s voice, unadorned, and a guitar. But instead “A Lover Loves” is a mockery of humanity. It doesn’t function as a song, Walker stopping every few seconds to got “psst psst psst” to something or someone we’re unaware of. Walker talks about the song while he sings it – A waltz for a dodo. Bolero for boys. A polka for Tintin – as he talks about something that may or may not be about necrophilia. “Bodies motionless for seconds at a time”. Everywhere that “Rosary” is a naked exposition, “A Lover Loves” is wry and angry, giddy in the fact that it’s not emotional at all.

CAN’T TURN FROM A CROTCH IN THE DARKNESS TO TURN TO THE VALLEY OF A KING

“Cue” is the centerpiece of the record – a chronicle of disease. A flugelhorn plays a simple couplet as an atmosphere builds, Walker starts speaking, not even singing really. He describes a man pounding his glass on a bar, “Bam Bam Bam Bam” and then seconds later we hear him pounding it out. The pounding haunts Walker throughout the song, knocking constantly, hounding him. He lists points of contact – “stars let to sky, lash let to eye, herpes to clit, then stops”. The screaming wall of strings punches through the silence, fleets of fighter planes advancing on top of you, “IMMUNITY. WON’T FEED ON THE BODIES.” More than anywhere else, this is the song where Walker is most consumed with the physical, with noise and bodies, with fluids and tumors, “when the voice flooded semen clotting to paste, can’t swallow it then bear it”. A man wanders a TB ward, spreading disease as he plays his horn for children. Cancer is evoked, Walker repeats the banging Bam Bam Bam Bam but nothing echoes back. Then stops.

Scott Walker’s work has been consumed by the need to evoke a moment through detail, but even on SCOTT 4, that manner of songwriting is still there. All along he has written this way, but the structures he works in have, more and more, favored texture, sacrificed conventionality in the name of imagery. Even the sounds on his records are imagery, the expansive strings are imagery, there is no part of his work that doesn’t exist to create an image in the listeners mind. For a such a singular artist, for someone with such an identity, with a wolrd so large rising out of his mind – Walker’s work is one of fragments, of moments torn open and given to us as images, without context of any sort beyond the sounds we’re given. Scott Walker isn’t God, that phrase is meaningless and empty, it’s the kind of thing that people who buy Jimi Hendrix box sets say, it’s the language of the thoughtless fan. The only way it works is to place Walker above his peers, and truly he has few. An irreductible artist, the kind of person who’s work isn’t something you listen to for fun, but because it means something. It means something in a way that random song I heard while fucking someone in a backseat, record I played after my grandmother died nonsense doesn’t. It means something in a way that isnt’ this song is about the holocaust, this song is about the starving children, this song is about sex trafficking. No, Walker makes fucking art. I seen a hand. I seen a vision.