Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hard Work, 24 May 2007
(Note: I wrote this review a while ago and gave the album four stars. That was a mistake. It should be ten. The trouble is, I can't change the rating above. Anyway, buy this album.)
When I first heard this record, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that someone could get away with making rubbish like this. 'Songs' sung on one note, no melody, no structure. And scary. I can't talk about individual tracks - they're all the same, scary. My daughter begged me to switch it off when she heard it, she was terrified. Fortunately, however, I gave it time and effort. So far it's been about four or five months and when I come home from work the record I always want to listen to, despite the lack of tunes, is this one. I don't understand why.
Walker's voice is amazing, of course, and the 'sonic landscape' (as Eno might put it) is constantly interesting and full of the unexpected. You can't sing along to it though.
If you're prepared to put in the effort, you may eventually enjoy this album. But don't count on it.
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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Holy smokes!, 15 Nov 2006
To the reviewer below unsure as to whether to get this album: I recommend it, but be warned. It is scary, even more so than Tilt; if your Scariest Moment in Music up to now was the eerie shrieking at the heart of Face on Breast, as mine was, then prepare to have the breath knocked out of you - *twice* - by The Escape on this album. It's easily the most horrific song I can recall hearing, if not the scariest sound I've ever heard when - (spoiler) - he does that thing with his voice.
But I'm dawdling too much on the one track; the whole thing is immensely rewarding, if you're up to it, and I for one had the long-forgotten feeling, playing this for the first time, that I was actually hearing something new and different for a change. Anyone with a casual interest should hear Tilt first, imho, and progress from there. It's cold, gruelling, and cathartic; it's that man again. Enough said.
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31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Death Fugue, 16 May 2006
Contemporary critics of the German Jewish Poet, Paul Celan, accused him of veering towards an expression that mirrored an altogether private world. Indeed, Celan set out to refine a "Hermetic language" that only he could unlock and codify, re-translating the tragedies of losing his mother and neighbours in the region of Bukovina, as the engines of extermination gathered momentum.
Just as Celan presented us with a cryptographic geography of the horrors of European Fascism. Walker boldly takes up the challenge and presents his own " Hermetic" world of horrors, without resorting to moralising. Each song is like a deep focus lense of war journalism, of the kind that we don't watch on televison anymore. Our collective eyes de-sensitized to atrocity, while our ears are deaf to the grief of the wandering dead, desperate to relay their stories to the living.
Thank god we have artists that still have private worlds.
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