"What can it cost to give a boy child back his sight?"
I've always seen Scott Walker as an artist out to deconstruct his own chosen art-form. What I mean by this is that his best work actively seeks to play with, and occasionally undermine, not only the conventions determining what a pop-song can do, but also the conventional attitudes and expectations brought to the listening experience by an audience. While Walker was no stranger to experimenting with the formal structure of a song, Scott 4 marks the place where he began to rethink the aesthetic ambitions of his music. The music he had become identified with through his contributions to The Walker Brothers and his early solo work tended to embrace the romanticized image of a beautiful, world-weary despair; however, by the time of Scott 4, Walker began to introduce dissonance into the musical mix. On songs such as "The Old Man's Back Again," one can hear subtle hints of this in Walker's vocal phrasings, beautiful to be sure, but also refusing to allow the listener to identify completely with the melody. This approach is something Walker would revisit to more startling effect 25 years later with his second masterpiece, Tilt. With Scott 4, Walker tumbled out of the commercial spotlight (although this might have had something to do with originally releasing the album under his given name Noel Scott Engel) and toward his present status as mercurial genius with a cult following; all this aside, it is undeniably the uncompromising masterpiece of his early solo career.
Scott 4 (2000 HDCD Remastered Edition)
1. The Seventh Seal (4:57)
2. On Your Own Again (1:48)
3. The World's Strongest Man (2:21)
4. Angels of Ashes (4:21)
5. Boy Child (3:38)
6. Hero of the War (2:28)
7. The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime) (3:43)
8. Duchess (2:50)
9. Get Behind Me (3:15)
10. Rhymes of Goodbye (3:04)
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