Scott Walker - Bish Bosch: reviews

A visit to Google will yield many reviews of Scott Walker's "Bish Bosch". Some representative comments are:

• The first time I heard Bish Bosch, I never wanted to hear it again.
• ... who wants to buy an album you can hardly bear to listen to?
• The first thing you hear is 30 seconds of drums that aren't so much being pounded as punished, overlaid with a kind of electronic shriek. And this is one of the more approachable moments on Bish Bosch.
• Bish Bosch is sick with corporeal disgust and philosophical disquiet
• 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 Ceausescu, illness, and disgust at the human body
• ... listening to Bish Bosch is a bruising, draining experience
• There's something repellently fascinating about Scott Walker's notion of music these days.
• At the center of it all is an old man wailing about cutting off his own balls and feeding them to someone.
• And, boy, has Walker really bitched it this time - nine new astounding abominations, nine new non-songs, bastards all, hymns without harmony, sheer discordia, and, lyrically, nothing but beasts, buggeries, and decapitations.
• ... furious assault of dystopian instrumentation

To be fair, here are a couple of the rather fewer positive [sic] comments:

• I started listening to this album with a mild amusement but kept returning to it to be both terrified and impressed in equal measure.
• It might not encourage repeat plays, but to dismiss it as a racket is to do it, and its maker, a huge disservice.

Well, I've listened to it twice now.

I suspect some of these reviewers have not heard some other things I possess since they might then find Bish Bosch disappointingly melodic. While it may not be the thing I would play when Mother-in-law's at home, it's certainly a possession of note. Ah, that voice.