Scott Walker's third album in the last 17 years features drums and guitars and other passing references to rock music, but its deepest roots are in the dissonant, turn-of-the century compositions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.
Bish Bosch starts with 30 seconds of what sounds like a jackhammer and ends with a funereal rendition of "Jingle Bells" for solo xylophone. In-between, there are tense silences, horror-movie strings, and 20-minute songs without verses or choruses. At the center of it all is an old man wailing about cutting off his own balls and feeding them to someone. The man seems to think this is some kind of opera. He is Scott Walker, and he puts the situation to us like this: "I've severed my reeking gonads/ Fed them to your shrunken face."
Genre: Rock
Reviewed by Ace Sway
Comments