FEATURE:
Second Spin
Scott Walker – Bish Bosch
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ALTHOUGH the album won some positive reviews…
one does not hear too many of its songs mentioned or played on the radio. As many of the songs on Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch are quite long, that is understandable. Although Bish Bosch is very different to his earlier albums, it is still utterly brilliant. The album was named among the best of 2012 by many publications. Released on 3rd December of that year, Walker described it as the final instalment in a trilogy that also includes Tilt (1995) and The Drift (2006). At seventy-three minutes, maybe Bish Bosch is a Scott Walker album for the diehards. Produced by Walker and Peter Walsh, I think that the album warrants more praise and exposure. Although it is a long and pretty intense listen at times, Walker said that Bish Bosch was written in just over a year. Before coming to a couple of reviews of Bish Bosch, I wanted to bring in an interview from The Quietus. In it,John Doran spoke with Scott Walker about the creation of the album and how it came together:
“You've said that you have to wait a long time for lyrics to come to you; that it's a waiting game. How long did it take in the case of Bish Bosch?
Scott Walker: This time I set aside a year, which normally I don't do. I just thought I'm going to try and see if I can speed up the process by not doing anything else. So it took me just over a year to get the lyrics and everything done, which is lightning speed for me. But I really had to wait and wait and wait almost every single day for the words to come.
Earlier this year your manager released a statement saying that Bish Bosch left off where The Drift finished. To what extent is that actually true and does the new album finish a notional trilogy?
SW: Well it feels like that, but I don't think it's literally true; they're not joined together. We have developed a style. And we've been elasticating that style, pushing it to its limits, and that's why I think people can hear this same sound going across three records. It's possible that this is the last time we'll try this particular atmosphere and we'll try something very different next time. But Bish Bosch is also very different. There's a lot of bass on The Drift and Tilt but on this one we've used the bass only here and there. That was because we were trying to get a vertiginous feeling where the bottom drops out from under you, leaving you with nothing to hold onto for a lot of the time. And when the bass comes in [smacks hands together violently] it's a very welcoming thing.
Some of the dark atmospherics on the album made me think of the more ambient end of dubstep. To what extent do you keep up with new music, say for example, on the Hyperdub label?
SW: I know Burial. I know all that stuff. I try and keep up with so much stuff, whether it's Burial or a hit record off the radio.
On first listen, I actually found Bish Bosch more harrowing than most current releases in the fields of black metal, noise, industrial and power electronics, where causing distress or discomfort to the listener is often an integral part of the aesthetic. To what extent do you know these genres, and to what extent are you trying to put your listener through the wringer, as it were?
SW: I'm aware of the sort of music you're talking about, black metal and so on. I'll dip in and listen to that kind of stuff but my music is coming from me - I don't know exactly how, but it is coming from me. Generally with [noise and power electronics etc] everything is going one way. The vocals and the sound are only going one way, and I try to give several layers to keep you interested, more like in a painting perhaps. Maybe there will be an underlying seriousness, maybe there will also be some humour, but there will be a lot of stuff happening at the same time. And I think that's the main difference between what I do and black metal for example.
Where did the album title come from? I believe it has something to do with an idea of a giant female artist…
SW: I knew I'd be playing with language more than I had on any of the previous albums. I wanted the title to introduce you to this kind of idea and reflect the feeling of the album, which was [claps hands briskly] bish bosh. And we know what bish bosh means here in this country – it means job done or sorted. In urban slang bish also [phonetically] means bitch, like "Dis is ma bitch". And then I wrote Bosch like the artist [Heironymous]. I was then thinking in the terms of this giant universal female artist. And this idea continued to play through the record in certain spots”.
Maybe not his most accessible album, I do feel that Bish Bosch is one of his most rewarding. The songs are fascinating and enormously powerful! It is hard to describe the effect and impact Bish Bosch has on you. I want to start by sourcing a review from AllMusic. This is what they observed:
“Bish Bosch is, according to Scott Walker, the final recording in the trilogy that began with 1995’s Tilt and continued in 2006’s The Drift. Its title combines urban slang for the word "bitch" and the last name of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Like its predecessors, Bish Bosch is not an easy listen initially. It's utterly strange, yet alluring. Musically, Walker is as rangy and cagey as ever. His players have worked with him since Tilt; they know exactly what he wants and how to get it. A string orchestra arranged and conducted by keyboardist Mark Warman, and a full symphony on three cuts are also employed. The lyrics on Bish Bosch are full of obscure historical, philosophical, medical, geographical and cultural allusions. For instance, subatomic science, a dwarf jester in Attila the Hun’s court, St. Simeon, and an early 20th century fad all appear in "SDSS14+3B (Zircon, A Flagpole Sitter)." Elsewhere, Nicolai Ceausescu, Nikita Khrushchev, the Ku Klux Klan, and God himself show up. While Bish Bosch is another exercise in artful pretension, it is the most accessible entry in this trilogy and well worth the effort to get at it. Themes of decay are woven throughout these songs -- of empire, of the body, of language and religion -- yet they are often complemented and illustrated by wry, pun-like, and even scatological humor. Walker's pessismism is akin to Samuel Beckett's and like the author, he holds space for a sliver of hope.
On "Corps de Blah," a chorus of farts answers an a cappella lullaby whose lyrics are grotesque. Before it's over, Walker reaches operatic heights vocally, singing about bodily functions, surgery ("Nothing clears out a room/like removing a brain"), speculative philosophy, and romantic betrayal, all while accompanied by thrumming, wailing strings, metallic guitar riffs, a flailing drum kit, and layers of electronics and ambience. "Epizootics!" uses a “tubax” -- part baritone sax, part tuba -- that introduces an infectious, fingerpopping drum chant before Walker employs bop-era vocal phrasing to climb to a careening crescendo before his version of a Hawaiian folk song closes it. "Tar’s" power electronics shriek is brought to earth by a rhythmic strategy that involves machetes frantically clashing against one another. Despite its 21-plus-minute monolithic length, "SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)" is almost welcoming. Layered ambient and looped textures, bombastic rock dynamics, metal guitars, soundtrack effects, and Walker's theatrical baritone allow the listener inside the maelstrom of his soundworld. Here, as in many other places on Bish Bosch, traces, hints, and suggestions of melody are given small but pronounced spaces that momentarily relieve the listener's sense of dislocation and tension before building them up again. His voice too, is freer to float and engage something approaching lyricism. With Bish Bosch, Walker creates a kind of Möbius Strip: by virtue of creating a less physically demanding sonic landscape, he provides a way into his iconic trilogy on his way out of it”.
To round things off, it is worth highlighting another review. One of the things I noticed about reviews of Bish Bosch is that they are passionate and deep. Those who heard the album were compelled to go into real detail! This is The Guardian’s take on Scott Walker’s fourteenth studio album:
“One might admire Walker's ambition, his determination not to underestimate his audience, but the risk is that all this leads to music as an arid intellectual exercise. The real skill of Bish Bosch lies not in the precision with which Walker has arranged sounds around his words, but in the fact that the results frequently affect the listener's gut before their brain. There's something thrilling about the moment when the rumbling groove of Epizootics! erupts into a weirdly uplifiting brass fanfare, or the arrival midway though Phrasing of a ferocious metal guitar riff. The vocal melody of Corps De Blah is utterly lovely – it's not so far from the kind of thing Walker would have once set to a luscious Wally Stott orchestration, instead of ominous electronics and the sound of a chisel hitting stone.
Walker has always protested that people miss the humour in his work – in fairness, that's perhaps an inevitable consequence of writing songs about existential despair, Nicolae Ceaus ‚escu, illness, and disgust at the human body – which may be why he appears to have amped it up here. It's hard to listen to Bish Bosch without dissolving into helpless laughter at least once, maybe at the chorus of farting noises on Corps De Blah, or perhaps during the 21 minutes of SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter), which not only finds Walker variously referencing subatomic science, Attila the Hun, Buñuel's 1964 film Simon of the Desert, Louis B Meyer and Roman numerals, but singing in his pained baritone about playing "fugues on Jove's spam castanets", a line that seems to come not from history or science or European arthouse cinema, but Roger's Profanisaurus.
Improbable ROFLs aside, listening to Bish Bosch is still a bruising, draining experience: however much you admire Walker's world, you might not want to stay there long. There's a paradox to it: it's music that clearly requires a lot of time and effort to fully unpick, while defying you to play it often enough to actually do that. For a lot of listeners, including his fans, that would make Bish Bosch a pretentious failure: who wants to buy an album you can hardly bear to listen to? Equally, you could argue that tells you more about how unchallenging and emotionally limited most rock music is than it does about Bish Bosch itself. Whichever side of the fence you fall on, you'd be hard-pushed to claim there's anything else remotely like the album itself”.
A phenomenal album that I feel one does not often mention or hear linked with the best of Scott Walker, Bish Bosch turns ten at the end of this year. Walker sadly died in 2019. His music and influence will live forever. He is a legend and iconic voice that will ring through the ages. He left so many incredible albums behind. Bish Bosch is one of them. If you have not heard it before, then now is a good time to…
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