Scott Walker: "The Seventh Seal" (1969)

Scott Walker has reinvented himself so thoroughly in the last twenty years that it’s almost a shock to re-encounter the mellifluous singer of the 1950s and 1960s, especially when he’s as pristinely produced and packaged as he is on the opening track of Scott 4, his fourth solo album. As might be expected, “The Seventh Seal” retells Ingmar Bergman’s iconic film – or retells the key images, since it often feels as if Walker is trying to recapture the frozen musicality of Bergman’s tableaux and compositions, the way they continue to burn themselves into your consciousness once the narratives and characters they couch have faded. Given that Walker’s musical vocabulary is essentially pre-rock, it perhaps makes sense that he turns to Marty Robbins’ cowboy croon and south-of-the-border saudade to set Bergman’s images against even more widescreen landscapes than are found in the film itself, reimagining The Seventh Seal as some vast, existential Western, as well as dooming the Western to Bergman’s existential fatalism in the process. As a harbinger of doomed horizons, then, it’s hard not to also read it as a soundtrack to the acid western ambience that hit Hollywood in the late 60s and early 70s, although it seems to relegate even that moment to futile obscurity, somehow turning the experimental, countercultural present into the remotest, most irretrievable past. Yet that’s Walker’s idea of pastiche, his mission and vision as the dark angel of kitsch. Fixated on the peculiar perfume of genres doomed to die, his music decays as soon as you hear it, so ripe it has nothing left to do but rot.