Scott Walker: Bish Bosch

7.5

Just when you thought Scott Walker couldn’t get any weirder, a new album emerges that’s farther out than anything previously released. Long disconnected from traditional rock and roll for over a decade, Scott Walker makes another entry into his catalogue of avant-garde records with Bish Bosch. One would be inclined to assume Walker is mixing styles of opera and free form minimalism, but something tells me he has departed from any label or genre completely. You will find little trace of any connection to another songwriter, nor will you hear anything close to mainstream or commercial music Scott Walker is famous for, like Scott 1 through 4. He has been on this avant-garde trip for a few albums now, but this is the weirdest of them all. It’s like a soundtrack for a movie that would never happen on this planet. I can’t help but contemplate how he feels this music, if this feels comfortable to him, or is he trying to push the limits of experimenting for the sake of discovering new sounds. Both might be true. Nevertheless, if you’re open-minded and willing to accept something like nothing you’ve ever heard before into your life, or iPod, get this record. I can’t even think of an album that would rival this sort of territory, maybe PiL’s The Flowers of Romance, but Johnny Lydon himself would raise a brow to this. Perhaps this will inspire thousands of musicians to start bands like this, which would inevitably collapse the music business if one of them got successful, but my assumption is this will stick with the past two Walker records, for the specific fans that stay loyal to his audio adventures. Will Scott Walker ever perform this stuff live? Will he ever perform anything live again? We shall see...