The cultish reverence around Scott Walker has not made his last 20 years of ear-buggering, meat-pummelling albums any more listenable. The former 1960s pop pin-up turned reclusive avant-garde composer’s first release in six years builds on the fusion of experimental musique concrète and abrasive electro-orchestral noise first heard on Tilt and The Drift.
In fact, if anything, it’s even more uncompromisingly extreme. And yet, perversely, Bish Bosch is also Walker’s richest and most fiercely beautiful work for decades. The musical palette is broad and bold, from walloping industrial techno like See You Don’t Bump His Head to the machete-sharpening horror-movie slither of Tar and the warped swing-jazz symphony of Epizootics!
As well as marathon tapestries of dense poetry, cinematic allusions and ancient historical episodes, Walker’s lyrics are also savagely scatological in places. References to a ‘wormy anus’ and ‘reeking gonads’ pepper the snappily titled 21-minute mini-symphony SDSS 1416+13D (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter).
Even at 69, the Howard Hughes of avant-rock can still hold his own against younger generations of cutting-edge noise-manglers, from Nine Inch Nails to Radiohead to Factory Floor.
