Fall Guys Fall is typically the time for blockbuster record releases, usually by aging superstars. These records will be competing with releases by younger bucks like Green Day, Portishead, Everclear, and the Tony Rich Project. A few weeks ago the local label Drag City reissued Tilt , the gorgeously austere Scott Walker album released in England in 1995. The American-born singer enjoyed success there in the 1960s as part of the Walker Brothers, but his popularity plummeted as a solo artist as his work grew increasingly strange and tortured. Walker once sang with a sumptuous croon, but now his voice evokes Gregorian chant and the kind of operatic caterwauling that would have given Alban Berg wet dreams.
Tilt seethes with a suffocating if beautifully wrought agony.
The lyrics are elliptical and evocative, and the music employs full orchestration as well as disjointed rocklike rhythms and textures. It's safe to say you've never heard anything quite like it. Several years of expensive, fruitless court battles over Grandmaster's sampling ended up destroying Liquid Liquid, who split up in 1985. A new eponymous CD released by Grand Royal collects the combo's four long-unavailable EPs. The business just left its digs in a Hyde Park basement for a new north-side location on the second floor of 1180 N. Milwaukee.