1983's solo return...
Jason Parkes | Worcester, UK | 03/21/2004
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Climate of Hunter came five years after Walker's last offering- the four songs he composed (his first in seven years) for the final Walker Brothers LP Nite Flights (1978). Walker was reportedly working with Bowie, Eno, Lanois & Sylvian...though they never appeared on the return that was Climate of Hunter (co-produced with Peter Walsh, who had been behind Simple Minds'New Gold Dream). In the meantime, Walker had become more of a cult- Julian Cope assembling the compilation 'Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker'. Climate of Hunter was Scott's sole offering in the 1980s, some of which has been remastered for the Five Easy Pieces box-set...Climate of Hunter doesn't share too much with the fabled 60s solo Scott, its origins are more in songs like The Electrician and Nite Flights (Tracks Three & Seven sound not unlike the latter)& listening here you can see how he would get to 1995's baffling masterpiece Tilt. The album as a whole has more in common with releases of the early 80s than ScottIII, sounding deeply original but making sense alongside such albums as Avalon (Roxy Music), The Correct Use of Soap (Magazine), Music for a New Society (John Cale) & Sulk (Associates). Despite being only 31-minutes long, it works well as an album and is intense and part of a complete vision Walker had: the sequence of songs is perfect, drifting from ambient to avant-rock to semi-classical to minimal-guitar...The lyrics are rather oblique, as opener Rawhide demonstrates: "Cro-magnon herders will stand in the wind...The insomniac gnaws in the On-Offs..."; while a song like Dealer predicts the vast sound of Tilt, though has more in common with Nite Flights at this point (it's more rock than avant-)Lyrically Dealer has that Beckettian thing going on, the lines "Move a circuit on the white...The windows are ringing...Ice junkies packed hard on a seam" seem to both advance and relate to The Electrician (Scott's bleak tale of CIA-torture in South America and in many ways his year zero).Track Three (Delayed)and Track Seven (Stump of a Drowner) feature rock-guitar and recall Nite Flights (the song) & are also not far away from Avalon-Roxy and early 80s Peter Gabriel (e.g. Shock the Monkey, I Don't Remember). They give the album a varied quality and take us from slower pieces...Sleepwalkers Woman is the missing link between 1969's Boy Child and the avant-classical Walker moved towards: Mahler, Schoenberg, Reich, Messiaen. That voice is still there, and its clear this is a big influence on KidA/mnesiac-Radiohead (How to...Completely, Pyramid Song): it sounds wonderful loud, another world completely (though the lyrics are the usual vague type, talking of exile & return). 60s Scott fans should love this, even if left confounded by Tilt...Track Five (It's a Starving) is more nightmare-lyrics and sounds, opening as a semi-ambient piece then expanding; while Track Six (Say I) sounds like another precursor of Radiohead and 1.Outside-Bowie, sounds like insects and horses braying: this is the most horrific moment, Walker's diabolus in musica still in song-form with lovely bass that recalls Barry Adamson and Mick Karn. The album concludes on the sparse cover of Blanket Roll Blues, written by Tennessee Williams & Kenyon Hopkins for the film The Fugitive Kind. This just features Mark Knopfler on guitar & Walker on vocals and has more in common with Derek Bailey/Bill Frisell than Dire Straits. An ambiguous note to end on, Walker's film-obssession concluding this vague collection of songs...Climate of Hunter is an underrated album in my opinion, it's one that reveals itself with every listen and its atmosphere was apparently an influence on U2's With or Without You. Perhaps a remastered version needs reissueing, but in the meantime this will do & is a reminder that Scott Walker made one of the great albums of the 1980s..."
