Scott Walker And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?

Perhaps nobody has strayed more from the teen idol path than Scott Walker. In the 60s, he hit it big with the Walker Brothers, a band of non-relatives from America who emigrated to England to be part of the British Invasion, and succeeded with hits such as The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore. In the late 60s and 70s he transitioned to a solo career as a dark balladeer heavily influenced by Jacques Brel. After a 70s reunion with the Walker Brothers, Walker has styled himself as a hermetic avant garde enigma. Releasing an ever stranger album once a decade, we should consider ourselves lucky to get And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?, a new release from pop music's Terrence Malick, just a year or so after his amazing full-length The Drift.

Commissioned by the South Bank Centre in London for a dance piece, Walker delivered four instrumental movements totalling twenty five minutes. For at least the first six or so, his legendary voice is sorely missed. The first part is full of silence and space, but not the spine tingling, evocative space that blew through The Drift. Meandering squiggles pop up here and there, only creating the distinct fear that Scott Walker, just recently making indelible nightmare ballads, has succumbed and regurgitated a generic set of navel gazing experimental classical dickery. One is reminded of Frank Zappa's lesser symphonic work, in which he got away with stringing together precious bits of weirdness simply because he was Zappa.

Fear of mediocrity is soon replaced by a more genuine creepiness, however, when Part Two stalks in, an unrelenting and slow march of percussive pounds and string stabs thumping through most of it. A sleazy swirl of strings rushes in and Walker is, from there on in, on his bizarre game, with overwhelming rushes and bleats penetrating spare near silence, locking the listener into a state of jagged disorientation, lulls punctured by howls of terror and despair. Surprisingly, it comes through without vocals. The third movement is a much more satisfying quietness than the first, as lonely strings snake in, building a melancholy dread until it is fuller and nearly unbearable. Part Four concludes the album unmercifully, violent strings arguing and escalating, threatening bells, culminating in a sustained and varied reverie of noise that is almost Hitchcockian. Though slighter than his proper albums, And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball? is further evidence that Scott Walker is one of the most unique and remarkable artists working, however rarely, in music today.