Scott Walker - Scott Walker Sings Jacques Brel (1981, comp.)

Other than the possibility for English speakers who don’t understand French (snob alert) to come close to enjoying Brel’s lyrics - their sort of simultaneously picaresque and world-weary existencialism - if you dig Brel himself, I could never truly fathom what real use you might have for Walker’s renditions of his songs, committed (and rather faithful) as they may be. Not to say that Sons Of, If You Go Away, and Next, are not dramatically effective; My Death actually beats the original arrangement; but then things like Jackie and The Girls and the Dogs turn the whole proceedings into a camp-fest (or reveal the underlying campiness of it all), which could have informed quite a few more notes on the subject from Susan Sontag. 

For one thing, Scott never really reached that perfect balance between melody and verbal rampage that Brel mastered so well; you find him jumping conspicuously from one register to the other. If nothing else, Walker’s gorgeous operatic register came at a price, and just wasn’t nimble enough to do it seamlessly, making everything too emphatic and choppy, while Brel integrated it into a single uninterrupted flow. Walker's enunciation single-handedly and automatically highlighted and made symbols out of almost every other word. In Brel, words were primarily narrative tools, which drew their power from the sequence they were placed in, not from being vocally singled out all the time; his occasional morceaux de bravure only existing and making full sense in a diegetic context.

Also, Brel made you feel like he was coming from a place of experience, and pulled you in to briefly share in snippets of life; Walker sounded like he was telling someone else’s stories, pointing to their experiences, fascinated by them, as obsessively as only someone who is looking outside in might - kind of like pervs getting their kicks online (so I'm told). 

Finally, orchestrally, this sort of stages an incongruous clash of traditions as, while Walker’s more than worthy arrangers back in the day (specifically, Peter Knight and Wally Stott) did rather interesting things with his own material, in these songs the added symphonic bombast does not really befit the subtleties of the storytelling, which in Brel was closely shadowed by a more attentive, precise, and subdued orchestral backdrop.

Still, it clearly was a step Scott needed to take in order to reach a steady place of his own, with Brel serving as a sort of surrogate for Walker to start testing the water regarding the exposure of his own troubled worldviews and troubling obsessions to his then wide-eyed teen public - whose tolerance to his extremely carnal, near grotesque, enunciation of "ass", "piss", “thighs”, “fat”, and other body parts, traits, and secretions, quickly faltered (the sort of thing that was also less noticeable in Brel perhaps in part because, and to quote the only thing remotely quotable from the Matrix movies, cursing in French is like "wiping your ass with silk") and, in retrospect, understandably so, as it announced the scatological doom he would sonically befall upon us all, which was hardly gonna tickle everyone’s fancy. As such, while this is a bridge I quickly burned from my listening habits, considering all that came from it, it just might qualify as one of the most productive failures in music history.

Manuel Barrueco - 300 Years of Guitar Masterpieces (1991, comp.)

 

The booklet holds little original recording information, but this constitutes basically an anthology of some of Barrueco’s initial, by then long and widely unavailable, recordings, from the late 70's, early 80's – ranging from Bach, Scarlatti and Cimarosa, to Villa-Lobos, Guarnieri and a Carlos Chávez gone wild, and including Albéniz and Granados (some of my favourites here; particularly the Spanish Dances, which Barrueco would come to record again, beautifully, in their entirety), but also Giuliani and Paganini (more in the virtuoso meh department). Still, a nice spread.

Those recording dates, in the early years of his career, may have something to do with the near absence of production values (not) to be heard, contributing to a very dry sound which underscores Barrueco’s distinctive picking technique: very terse, with the strings in maximum tension, making him sound here, even more than usual, like he’s playing with barbwire. In his case that is not necessarily a bad thing, though. Unlike most classical guitar recordings, which favor echo-laden environments, like churches, to enhance the instrument’s feeble sound projection, this sounds very direct and close captured. Every note stands pretty much naked before us, with practically no reverb (from itself, the previous or the accompanying notes) to shroud it. It is as if he was playing right beside you, and all that proximity gives him no room to hide any shortcomings, which actually grants him the opportunity to show that wiggle room to be something he had no need for in the first place. The rollercoaster renditions of a few of Villa-Lobos' Estudos, particularly, go for a technical suspension of disbelief, that actually unravels new textural ground in some of them (still, the Suite Popular Brasileira sounds anaemic by contrast, so there was still some interpretive room to grow - as he would later show with his benchmark recording of the 5 Prelúdios). 

A guy who can put most guitarists playing in cathedrals to shame while he sounds off in the pantry: that’s Barrueco for you, and he was just getting started.