Scott Walker - Tilt
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Free Music Notes for Tilt
Free Music Review: Great Scott
Hit: 5 Stars
Scott's beautiful voice, at once haunting and goofy, with weird lyrics and weirder music makes an unbeatable cocktail. Arguably his finest album to date.Free Music Review: if there was one thing that shocked me
Hit: 5 Stars
it was tilt. radiohead, david bowie, gary numan, david sylvian, all of the punk bands, were just jerks, except ramones' outsider.
the very intelligent guy reviewing this disc before me never said anything about any alternative. there is no alternative. let's see.
Free Music Review: The Dawn of New Music
Hit: 5 Stars
I received Scott Walker's Tilt today, and have just finished listening to all the pieces. As many reviewers noted, the pieces in Tilt may not be instantly enjoyable (one may remember that many things that are "instantly enjoyable" may not be memorable, after all); however, I believe that those who have been to an avant-garde theatrical performance and have enjoyed the experience would most probably appreciate Scott's album Tilt. As for me, I thoroughly appreciated the musical pieces in this album. They were both eerily beautiful and thought provoking. Some pieces seem to hold more personal significances (to Scott himself) but others seem to have more universal resonance. As for his lyrics, Scott seems to utilize the connotative and metaphorical functions of language freely and consciously. For this reason, we may interpret each piece differently, but there is no need for fretting over the "correct" interpretation of each piece (as many post-structuralists say, language is finally unstable). Nevertheless, if you are familiar with Freud's Interpretations of Dreams you may want to apply the same interpretative method (I did and I feel that I comprehended some pieces better).
Scott Walker was my musical idol when I was a teenager in Japan. I bought most of his albums and adored his beautiful voice and person. Indeed, the Walker Brothers concert was the only pop concert that I had ever attended. However, due to the rigor of my education and relocation (I'm now living in U.S.A. and working as a college professor) I have almost totally forgotten about his music. Now that I re-discovered the glory and courage of his music I have been buying up his CDs through Amazon.com. I listen to his more immediately accessible music (both to my senses and emotions) when I just want to feel, and I listen to Tilt and Drift (which I'm planning to purchase) when I want to be jolted out of my complacency. Scott Walker's music is highly recommended. In particular, those who are fed up with the highly commodified music of recent years may appreciate his music very much.
Finally, I hope that Amazon will make Stephen Kijak's documentary, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, available to us Americans.
Free Music Review: A Remarkable Album by a Serious Musician
Hit: 2 Stars
There aren't many albums about pinball machines, and this is not one of them.
I'm not a fan of Scott Walker. It's not that I dislike him, I just haven't heard any of his music and I have no interest in it. I was not alive when The Walker Brothers were popular and I am not the kind of person who is attracted to underground legends. I am drawn to "Tilt" because it is frequently described as one of the most uncommercial, offputting, extreme pop albums ever, an operatic analogue of PiL's "Flowers of Romance" or Terence Trent D'Arby's "Neither Fish Nor Flesh". I love extremes, but in this respect Tilt it a disappointment. The music is odd, but not unimaginable. It has abrupt dynamic shifts, and there is no pop; it is often formless, like the last two Talk Talk records, but it is recognisable as music.
Nonetheless it is the kind of album that would clear the floor at a disco or a party. Like many sincere artistic statements, Tilt has an air of camp, and I found it easy to laugh at. Scott Walker's voice is hard to take seriously unless you are a fan. His voice reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Elmer Fudd sang "kill the rabbit" to a tune by Wagner. As I listen to "The Cockfighter" I am not concentrating on the music, I am thinking of Elmer Fudd dressed as a Rhine Maiden, singing "kill the wabbit", and I am thinking about cocks. The production on "The Cockfighter" exploits extreme dynamic range. The song starts with quiet music and crackling noises, and then shifts to very loud drums. It has a one-note saxophone solo. It is not as extreme as the reviews say. The drums sound weak. I was not floored.
The album does however gets off to a good start with "Farmer in the City", which has Scott Walker emoting into a big echo chamber, with a strings orchestra grinding moodily in the background. It is a tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini, an intellectual newspaper columnist stroke filmmaker who is exactly the kind of person you would expect Scott Walker to write a tribute song about. I have no idea how the lyrics relate to Pasolini's life, but the music is spooky and the song conveys an atmosphere. It works.
"Bouncer See Bouncer" is similar to Farmer in the City, but without the strings. It has tinkly bells and a bass drum instead. The middle eight drops the bells and the drum in favour of some horns and a harp. It is very pretty, although if you can't stand Walker's vocal style then the song, and the whole album, is a dead loss, because he is mixed high up and the accompaniment is often very low-key. Scott sings as if he is experiencing fear beyond comprehension, disgust, loathing, and insane ecstasy, but he does so in a mannered style.
"Manhattan" is similar to Bouncer See Bouncer but with church organ and some jazzy drums. Although I am not a hi-fi freak, I imagine that this album is a favourite of hi-fi freaks, because it has the same kind of sterile, detailed sound as a Steely Dan album. "Face on Breast" combines the basic concept of the Scott's voice plus instruments idea with a rolling beat that is clearly derived from "I Can't Dance" by Genesis. "Bolivia '95" starts with some funky bass before turning into a relatively conventional pop song. "Patriot" is much happier-sounding than the rest of the album, although the happy mood is undermined by violins that sound like a million chattering locusts bursting from the flesh of a hundred dying seagulls. In the context of the rest of the album, Patriot's cheerfulness is unsettling. "Tilt" is a mid-tempo rocker with a prominent bassline. "Rosary" is a short coda. When a writer is bored with his subject he ceases to evoke, and instead describes.
This is the kind of album that only gets five-star reviews, because non-fans of Scott Walker will never hear it, or hear of it, and will never be roused to write about it. I wish he had written more than a series of mid-tempo, vocal-led operatic numbers with generally low-key backing. The Cockfighter is the only song that breaks this template - it has a section that sounds like industrial rock circa 1995 - but the rest bores me. It's a lot of jazzy vocal improvisations with a tasteful, twisted art music backdrop, dead-sounding spishy drums, fretless bass, and sound effects. If you search Google for this album the next result after Amazon.com is an article entitled "Tilt by Scott Walker: A remarkable album by a serious musician", and when I read "a remarkable album by a serious musician" I subconsciously reach for the safety catch on my non-existent Browning.
Free Music Review: "It was the journey of a life"
Hit: 5 Stars
It took me 11 years to decide to buy this album. When it was first released in 1995 i was unable to come to terms with the material from it i heard on alternative radio in The Netherlands (VPRO). I was 19 and no novice to 'difficult' music. About 5 or 6 years later i decided to give TILT another try. Still no connection; it seemed so pretentious i burst out laughing. When i started listening to opera a few years back, i regularly found myself singing: "Do i hear 21, 21, 21..." (from FARMER IN THE CITY) and i knew i was going to have to give TILT another try.
i was never unaware of Scott Walker (real name: Noel Scott Engel) as i knew of his past with the Walker Brothers, whose music never left a lasting impression on me. TILT was, however, my first experience of the music Walker made as a solo artist. Recently i bought both TILT and THE DRIFT (already released in Europe) together and i was stunned by what i failed to understand 11 years ago.
TILT is a timeless masterpiece of bleak, austere beauty. Although the music is the very definition of commercial suicide (not unlike Nico's THE MARBLE INDEX) coupled with lyrics that are nothing short of cryptic, TILT draws the interested listener back time and again to it's lackluster soundworld. Walker's musical language is mainly made up of ambient, modern classical music and industrial, the overall ambiance of the album defies categorisation. In a time of record companies looking for marketable music, TILT is certainly a statement of artistic freedom, lack of fear, courage and persistance.
As much as i would like to analyse the individual components to make it easier for the uninitiated listener, i feel at a loss when trying to do so, as if disecting a bacteria with a scalpel.
TILT is simply "the journey of a life".