Scott Walker - Scott 3

Scott Walker has had one of the most outlandish and intriguing career trajectories of any artist, clocking over 50 years from being a teen-bop child star, and somehow leading to awakening some of the most batshit-insane avant-garde music of the modern age; his discography is a descent into madness. Scott 3finds Walker in the middle of his mononymous Scott 1-4 phase, a series of pop-agreeing albums built to hold up Walker’s performance with sonic cinematics. With baroque pop emerging at the time of this LP, Walker refrained from psychedelia like his contemporaries, favouring to keep his music serene and earthly, inadvertently acting as an incredible precursor to chamber pop and flickers of Kate Bush’s work.

“Winter Night” is a brief, Fantasia-esque serenata that encompasses a blockbuster’s-worth of visceral emotion by way of its grand instrumentation, soaring and simmering all at an interlude’s length. The strings and woodwinds truly glides the song while being texturally complex, forming a reference point for a host of artists, be it Goldfrapp, Bowie, Beck or Kid A-era Radiohead. On the surface, the orchestral pop housed under this record follows artists like Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra, however, the crucial difference is the addition of Wally Scott’s redolent strings that are pigmented with airborne drones and traces of dissonance. Songs like “Big Louise” show how these immense arrangements colour the album, fluttering or rising wherever appropriate, but what further tints each Waltz-metered symphony is its pairing with Walker’s desolate lyrical themes of isolation and heartbreak. The writing style of Nick Cave could be traced back to this era of Walker, yet no-one could touch how the latter’s sonorous vocals lather the album’s filmic qualities. His 60s music feels like it occupies its own, wintery space, like a snowglobe, and with an experimental edge on his third effort, it breathes an extra dose of that same magic.