It’s chastening to remember that Scott Walker’s first four solo records were recorded and released within three years. We’re now comfortable with the paradox that while fashion speeds up, culture slows down, but even by current standards, Walker is taking his own sweet time. If we include the four Scott songs on The Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights (and “The Electrician” is certainly the founding stone of this new era), then Scotts 5 through 8 span 28 years. It’s the pace of a novelist, or a poet, maybe; slow nights, massing to years, of editing and rewriting. It certainly seems to be how Walker now sees himself. “Every single sound in the track is related to the lyric in some way,” he said around the time of 1995’s Tilt. “I'm trying to go for something as carved down as possible.” That ambition has been abundantly achieved on The Drift, a record that’s pared down yet cosmically dense, as though compacted by geological pressures. Does that make it a diamond? Well, let’s say it’s the kind of rock record Samuel Beckett might have made: gnomic, terrifying, bleakly funny, often utterly unfathomable and advancing by its own strange logic. For all its industrial scree and jump-cut imagery, Tilt still bore the signature of Walker the existential balladeer, Jean-Paul Sinatra. “Farmer in the City” and “Patriot” were, in their way, as lush as “Montague Terrace”. The Drift offers no such consolation. Guitars scratch savagely, like Link Wray auditioning for Stockhausen. Rhythms are minimal, martial and produced, on occasion, by hammering a wooden box with a brick or thumping at a pig carcass. Strings lurch sickeningly with Bernard Herrmann psychosis, and Walker’s mournful baritone has been superseded by an urgent tenor, declaiming short phrases that merely hint at melody. “Cossacks Are” sets the tone. A two chord twang, a desperate rhythm, and a series of implored phrases that seem to evade narrative: “A moving aria for a vanishing style of mind”; “You could easily picture this in the current top ten”; “Medieval savagery, calculated cruelty.” This last, you might remember, was Chief Prosecutor Carla De Ponte’s summation of Slobodan Milosevic’s crimes in the former Yugoslavia, crimes that haunt the whole record. One aspect of this Drift is continental: Europe’s sleepwalk back to fascism. With a few hunches and a thorough afternoon on Google, you could trace other phrases back to book reviews, George Bush’s entreaties to Jacques Chirac, eulogies for Pope John Paul II. The collage effect, splicing the world historical with tabloid tittle tattle, is reminiscent of John Berger, years ago, flicking through the Sunday Times Magazine, from the spectacle of Bangladeshi refugees to aftershave ads, and declaring, “The culture that produced this incoherence… is insane”. Insane perhaps, but this style of blind quotation and vivid montage provides much of the method of The Drift. I could devote the rest of this issue simply to exegesis of these often baffling songs. The already infamous line from “Jolson And Jones” - “I’LL PUNCH A DONKEY IN THE STREETS OF GALWAY!” - refers to Allan Jones; not Uncut’s editor, but father of the younger Scott’s matinee idol Jack Jones. Jones père was a classically trained tenor who wound up in Hollywood and became best known for the novelty hit “Donkey Serenade”. Walker’s song has him commiserating with a drunk, paranoid Al Jolson in a ‘40s Vegas that doubles as the suburb of hell set aside for washed-up crooners. I’ll leave the other songs to your own suspicions, investigations and imaginations. What’s clear is the seriousness of Walker’s intent. This is a record of an ambition that’s rare anywhere in our culture, let alone pop music. This aspiration leaves The Drift wide open to accusations of absurd pretension. “Jesse” is a vexed meditation on 9/11 that quotes the guitar phrase from “Jailhouse Rock”, and makes a dream equation between the twin towers and Elvis and his stillborn twin Jesse Garon. “Buzzers” finds an obscure link between Balkan wars (the repeated refrain “kad tad” is Serbian for “one day”, the motto of patient vengeance-hunger) and the evolution of horses. “The Escape” is a paranoid vision that seems to conclude with a demonic Daffy Duck rasping, “What’s up doc?” Is it impossible to take with a straight face? Frequently. Will it disappoint those hoping for a return to elegant classicism? Profoundly. Does it strike you with a lurid, imagistic and nightmarish urgency? Always. Almost uniquely, this is a record that genuinely sounds like nothing you have heard before. If you can rise to its portentous challenge, if you can meet it even close to halfway, The Drift will prove to be a frightening, bewitching and rewarding experience. By Stephen Trousse

Their cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds Of Love” made The Futureheads bona fide pop stars. Running on accepted music biz logic, their second album, News And Tributes, should set out to consolidate such success with a suite of polished post-punk tracks, all Gang Of Four jerkiness and barber’s shop four-part harmonies. The opening “Yes/No”, however, tells a different story. “My advice goes as follows,” sings Barry Hyde, over salutes of metallic guitar, “Go home, brick yourself in/ Think about it properly/ Go back to the beginning.” Or, as one bright spark once put it: rip it up, and start again. Recorded in a six-week stint at a farmhouse outside Scarborough, News And Tributes replaces the hectic Technicolor rush of the debut – once described by the band as “a punch in the face” - with a more spacious, wistful feel comparable to late-period XTC or Wire, but defiantly of the Futureheads’ own creation. Thematically, however, an impulse towards the deconstructive spirit of post-punk remains. “Fallout” and “Burnt” subvert traditional love themes, the former a Romeo And Juliet for Cold War paranoiacs, the latter a curdled, minor-key prog construction that equates falling in love with receiving third-degree burns and concludes that, “Nothing lasts forever and nothing is free”. Generally, it’s the quiet numbers here like the title track, a misty-eyed homage to the victims of the Munich air disaster, that impress more than familiar, harmony-laden numbers like “Cope” or “Worry About It Later”. That, however, would be to ignore the crushing “Return Of The Berserker”, a track that’s hammered into the middle of News And Tributes like a stake through the heart. A one-chord clatter just a notch off the jackhammer pummel of Big Black, it’s seemingly thrown in to prove The Futureheads still can: that they don’t, it’s implied somewhat elegantly, is merely their choice. Like mid-‘80s Scritti Politti, News And Tributes is pop music made by DIY heads, accessible sounds made by young men loathe to sell their intelligence down the river. True, it might not awaken the same instant delight as its predecessor, but its cries should resonate as long, and as loud. By Louis Pattison

Grandaddy’s final album is deeply elegiac, but then, so were the previous four. Together, they comprise a disquieting chronicle of a sector of American civilization inhabited by lost souls living in cars that don’t run. On Just Like The Fambly Cat, songwriter Jason Lytle once again drapes a tattered astral gauze over the strip-mall banalities that surround him, presumably as an escape mechanism to despair, or the “color printer blues,” as he wryly puts it in “Disconnecty.” The band’s other distinguishing marks — the mock-heroic powerchords, the cut-rate arpeggios of analog synths, Lytle’s Neil Young-emulating vocals — are reprised as well. But everything now seems as worn out and used up as Lytle’s subjects, along with the imagery that brings them to life. The album as a whole resembles the garage sale described, with characteristically telling detail, in “Where I’m Anymore”; as if the band’s sounds and themes had lost whatever value their owners had once attributed to them, like “exercise equipment piled high” on “oil-stained driveways.” All of that makes the album’s self-referential centrepiece, “Rear View Mirror”, all the more poignant. Affirmation occurs only in the anthemic instrumental “Skateboarding Saves Me Twice,” which wordlessly conjures up vivid, slow-motion footage of laughing, airborne children, and by extension suggests that there is still something to live for. If Just Like The Fambly Cat overtly concerns itself with the world Lytle lived in until breaking up the band and moving from the smalltown of Modesto in Northern California to Montana, its underlying theme is Grandaddy itself, a group whose considerable artistic achievements went down as the members struggled to put food on the table. They also had to deal with the related reality that any discussion of the conjoined themes of technology and metaphysics in alternapop begins not with Grandaddy, but with the Flaming Lips, and it’s tough to keep the faith when your work is overlooked and undervalued. For all these reasons, Just Like the Fambly Cat stands as a modern landmark in an obscure subgenre that might be labelled the underdog saga, the template for which was set by Mott, the 1973 masterpiece from another band that never got the respect it deserved. By Bud Scoppa

Though the excellent additional disc of out-takes accompanying this reissue is welcome, it is also, in a sense, redundant. Eighteen years ago, when Fisherman’s Blues was originally released, it was an album that communicated everything you were ever really going to need to know about it in the first 20 seconds, and this is still the case. There are few more purely thrilling openings to a record: the big pealing G chord that announces the title track, a whipcrack of Anthony Thistlethwaite’s mandolin, Steve Wickham’s fiddle sounding the charge, then the entire band arriving like cavalry behind Mike Scott’s delirious whinny. In 1985, Scott, grumpy and reluctant about the stadium-filling fame that beckoned his Waterboys beyond This Is The Sea, had gone to stay in Ireland for a week. Three years later, he was back to tell us what a hell of a time he’d had. When musicians go scrabbling in search of roots, it’s usually an indicator of dwindling ambition. For Scott, his exploration of folk, country and blues became a madcap treasure hunt. Fisherman’s Blues encompassed orthodox country drinking songs (“Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?”), raggle-taggle whimsy (“And A Bang On The Ear”, presented here in a slightly longer version) and brooding, gothic balladry (“Strange Boat”), all played with astonishing technical virtuosity and infused with Scott’s trademark grand passion. The extra disc included here is drawn from a similarly broad palette, including two Dylan covers (“Girl Of The North Country”, “Nobody ‘Cept You”; The Basement Tapes were an obvious inspiration) and alternate versions of “Fisherman’s Blues” and “Killing My Heart” (better known as “When Ye Go Away”). It’s just a shame that Scott’s blazing-eyed crusade to reawaken the soul of Celtic folk was answered by such a knock-kneed crop of recruits. The musical legacy of Fisherman’s Blues amounted to little more than a couple of mildly amusing Wonder Stuff singles, The Levellers, and a plague of woolly-hatted young men with acoustic guitars on Grafton Street, eventually provoking Scott to sing, on 1995’s “Dublin (City Full Of Ghosts)” that “Dublin is a city full of buskers/Playing old Waterboys hits”. All that really matters is all that’s here: a fabulous, joyous riot. By Andrew Mueller