Scott Walker: Climate of Hunter

In the early 70s, Scott Walker the artist disappeared, replaced by Scott Walker the singing check-casher. He went through the same paces when reuniting with his original group, The Walker Brothers, until 1978, when the group released Nite Flights. It contained Scott’s first original songs since Til the Band Comes In and they were unlike anything he’d written before. His four tracks on that album were critically praised.

Then Walker disappeared from the music world completely.

As I’ve said before, Walker’s artistic progression couldn’t have been more ripe for legend if he had planned it. Stardom as a unique, dark and tortured figure. Challenging and out-of-fashion solo work. Commercial failure and retreat into puerile work-for-hire. A tiny flash of genius and then silence.

It was the right formula to kindle interest in his work. In 1981, one of Britain’s many eccentric pop geniuses, Julian Cope, released a compilation of Walker originals. The album was titled Fire Escape in the Sky:  The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker and focused on original songs from his first five albums. Two more compilations quickly followed and Walker was signed with Virgin Records.

The album he produced was Climate of Hunter, released in 1984.

It’s probably best to consider it a transitional album. A few of the melodies have traces of his earlier, more somber ballads but none of the incredible bombast. One may hear an echo or two of his tracks on Nite Flights, but very little. At the same time, there are just as few hints of the style he would develop on the next three albums.

This article from The Quietus does a good job of appraising it in the context of his other work and gives us a label to hang on the album:  art pop, that sideways little genre that could only have emerged from the 70s.

No discussion of the album is complete without quoting the first line from the opening track, “Rawhide:”  “This is how you disappear.” It’s taken autobiographically, of course, but the song really is remarkable, with its rising tension leading to a frenzied gallop followed by a slow release:

This was 1984, so of course Virgin produced a music video, for “Track 3" (Starts at 5:18):

This is the most obviously pop track, even with lyrics about washing “the murder away” and a messianic tilt. A catchy melody, too.

“Sleepwalker’s Woman” is the track most similar to his earlier work, a languorous ballad. The difference is in the indirectness of his lyrics; as with Nite Flights, Walker is no longer straining to describe things exactly. He’s content with expressionistic abstractions.

“Track Five” gives us the best picture of the production style Walker practiced on the album. He kept the vocal melody a secret from his session musicians and nowhere is the contrast more obvious than here. The live backing band sounds almost like an instrumental bed for a  Miami Vice chase. When Walker’s vocals come in, it throws the band and his voice against one another.
“Track Six” is the clearest bridge between his older work and his future albums, even if it is the oddest sounding track on the album. A little crooning in combination with frightening tones. Walker would leave behind the former and explore the power of the latter as he progressed.

An album like this is almost critic-proof and it’s a shrewd move for Walker, even if that wasn’t his intention. To attempt to remake Scott 4 would only invite comparisons and Walker had gone through a lot in those fifteen years. It’s surprising that he didn’t follow through with the sound he created on Nite Flights, but it’s also evidence that Walker had returned to following his muse and doing so with even less compromise than before.