Track Listing

1. Cossacks Are
2. Clara
3. Jesse
4. Jolson And Jones
5. Cue
6. Hand Me Ups
7. Buzzers
8. Psoriatic
9. Escape
10. Lover Loves

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11051 in Music
• Released on: 2006-05-08
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .36 pounds

CD Description
An utterly unique accomplishment, Scott Walker's THE DRIFT is the enigmatic British-based singer-songwriter's first official album since 1995's challenging TILT. Those looking forthe Brechtian drama and crooner stylings of Walker's laudedlate-'60s work will happily find them on these 10 haunting tracks, albeit in altered forms that often bypass melody to create what sometimes recalls a chilling sonic abstraction of Edgar Allan Poe's writings.
While two extended tracks, "Clara" and "Cue", wander down some frightening paths (occasionally calling to mind Kronos Quartet's BLACK ANGELS), and make up a considerable amount of THE DRIFT, the record also includes slightly less daunting pieces such as "Cossacks Are", which builds to propulsive rhythmic passages, and "Jesse", a brooding song seemingly rising up from some forsaken underground chamber. Far from accessible, yet mesmerizing in its bleak minimalist vision, THE DRIFT once again reinforces Walker's reputation as a fascinating and thoroughly unconventional artist.

Customer Reviews

Hard Work
(Note: I wrote this review a while ago and gave the album four stars. That was a mistake. It should be ten. The trouble is, I can't change the rating above. Anyway, buy this album.)


When I first heard this record, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that someone could get away with making rubbish like this. 'Songs' sung on one note, no melody, no structure. And scary. I can't talk about individual tracks - they're all the same, scary. My daughter begged me to switch it off when she heard it, she was terrified. Fortunately, however, I gave it time and effort. So far it's been about four or five months and when I come home from work the record I always want to listen to, despite the lack of tunes, is this one. I don't understand why.

Walker's voice is amazing, of course, and the 'sonic landscape' (as Eno might put it) is constantly interesting and full of the unexpected. You can't sing along to it though.

If you're prepared to put in the effort, you may eventually enjoy this album. But don't count on it.

Holy smokes!
To the reviewer below unsure as to whether to get this album: I recommend it, but be warned. It is scary, even more so than Tilt; if your Scariest Moment in Music up to now was the eerie shrieking at the heart of Face on Breast, as mine was, then prepare to have the breath knocked out of you - *twice* - by The Escape on this album. It's easily the most horrific song I can recall hearing, if not the scariest sound I've ever heard when - (spoiler) - he does that thing with his voice.

But I'm dawdling too much on the one track; the whole thing is immensely rewarding, if you're up to it, and I for one had the long-forgotten feeling, playing this for the first time, that I was actually hearing something new and different for a change. Anyone with a casual interest should hear Tilt first, imho, and progress from there. It's cold, gruelling, and cathartic; it's that man again. Enough said.

Death Fugue
Contemporary critics of the German Jewish Poet, Paul Celan, accused him of veering towards an expression that mirrored an altogether private world. Indeed, Celan set out to refine a "Hermetic language" that only he could unlock and codify, re-translating the tragedies of losing his mother and neighbours in the region of Bukovina, as the engines of extermination gathered momentum.

Just as Celan presented us with a cryptographic geography of the horrors of European Fascism. Walker boldly takes up the challenge and presents his own " Hermetic" world of horrors, without resorting to moralising. Each song is like a deep focus lense of war journalism, of the kind that we don't watch on televison anymore. Our collective eyes de-sensitized to atrocity, while our ears are deaf to the grief of the wandering dead, desperate to relay their stories to the living.


Thank god we have artists that still have private worlds.