Perhaps I misused the word 'production' - The audio fidelity and remastering on the box is fairly impeccable - I meant the overall concept and presentation - My opinions on the release are summarized below in a review I wrote for amazon.com...


A shabby tribute to a great artist... December 11, 2003

Well, first off, as another reviewer said, the music presented here is (overall, at least) first-class. Scott Walker has done work that is unsurpassable in its genres (brooding orchestral pop, avant-industrial oratorio) as well as some pretty mediocre MOR slush in the 70s that it is conveniently forgettable. This compilation takes the challenging approach of attempting an overview of the artist's entire career: from the mature, Phil Spector-influenced teen ballads of the Walker Brothers to the Neo-Romantic / Industrial barrage of implosive psychic disintegration exemplified on "Tilt". Not an easy task, and one at which the pseudonymous and unknown producers of this debacle have regrettably failed.

To begin with, the half-baked notion of arranging the music by corralling the songs onto separate CDs based on 'themes' such as 'the introspective Scott', 'songs for/about/or by females', or 'An American in Europe' (which preposterously contrasts the Brel-inspired chanson of "Scott" 1 through 4 with Walker's embarrassing forays into country music), results in an incohesive mix. On the 'soundtracks' CD you have MOR Hollywood film themes from "The Moviegoer" unflatteringly butted up against the dark, sublime Mahlerian orchestrations of "POLA X". Or (on the 'songs for women' disc) a disposable performance by Esther Ofarim (whose only excuse for appearing on Scott's fifth solo album was that she was the producer's wife!) followed by the harrowing Ute Lemper tracks. If you are going to break the content down into digestible portions and present an overarching survey of all of Scott Walker's work, it might have been better to segregate the music onto separate discs such as the Walker Bros period, the classic 60s solo work ("Scott" 1-4 and "Til the Band Comes In"), beautifully reinterpreted MOR standards (from the 60s to 70s), avant-garde experimentation ("Nite Flights", "Climate of Hunter", "Tilt"), and (how about it?!) a CD of rare demos, outtakes, and B-sides.

The negligible liner notes to this box claim that this set is for the average listener and not the die-hard fan. Well, who buys multi-CD box sets apart from the die-hard fans?! A casual listener is not going to spend the equivalent cost of five new list-priced CDs on a set devoted to a single artist unless he/she is already a devoted enthusiast. In producing a box set one is attempting to pay tribute to a significant artist with an estimable body of work. Usually one expects to find some previously unreleased tracks (there are some rare treasures on "Five Easy Pieces", to be sure, many out-of-print though all previously released). At the least the box set can be expected to come with a lavish or elegant package design, detailed track notes (recording location & dates, personnel credits), thoughtful and informative essays, unpublished archival photographs. Virtually all of the box sets I own by my favorite artists (Stooges, Velvet Underground, ABBA, Faust, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, Eric Dolphy, LaMonte Young) demonstrate a worthwhile degree of thought, care and expense in production and packaging. But as our other reviewer Mr Orton complained, this is one flimsy, insubstantial package (thin cardboard, poorly printed booklet, dimwitted texts, substandard graphic design worthy of a cheapo KTEL production). Which certainly is a great injustice to such an uncompromising, discriminating artist as Scott Walker.

Well, I did say the music here is great, and there are some RARE GEMS included, no doubt. And since many of Scott's important recordings are currently out-of-print, fans who have been unable to find such titles as "Climate of Hunter" or unwilling to pay the high prices these albums command on eBay can now get a taste of such work. While I am a 'die-hard fan' I am by no means a completist, and there are some monumental tracks here I have never heard until now. The two pieces Scott wrote for Ute Lemper a few years back are brilliantly suspenseful epics of entropic orchestration on a par with "Tilt". One of these two pieces was only released on a Japanese pressing of Lemper's CD, and the other, 'Scope J', reminds me uncannily of something from the Carla Bley / Paul Haines avant-opera "Escalator Over The Hill". While Ute Lemper's vocal performance is far from sublime (how much better it would have been to hear Dagmar Krause or Diamanda Galas sing these tracks!), the composition and arrangements carry the affair despite her expressive limitations. And the two tracks (pre-Tilt) from the French film "Toxic Affair" only came out as a CD-single and would cost an exorbitant amount if you managed to procure a copy. Chances are, if you are a fan, you will want this collection for the luxury of at last getting to hear such rare tracks. One song I am very disappointed they failed to include here is the movie theme "I Still See You" (only the lovely B-side is featured on this collection). Scott's biography "A Deep Shade of Blue" tells of how Scott enraged the producers and songwriters by altering the lyrics to conform to his own skewed vision of irrational absurdity, and I have yet to hear the record.

One final warning (which demonstrates just how shoddy this whole production is): The copy I bought of this box is defective. Bizarre as it must sound, Disc Three has ONLY ONE CHANNEL OF AUDIO (the right channel) - The left channel of the stereo mix is entirely absent. I returned it to the store where I bought it (a megastore which had about a dozen copies in stock at the time of purchase) and was told by the sales clerk that THE WHOLE PRESSING IS DEFECTIVE in this respect: no left channel on Disc Three. This type of error seems like it would have to have occurred at the mastering stage and would seem likely to be reproduced on ALL COPIES, though I am not in a position to affirm this. I exchanged the defective box for another one and found the same problem. When the clerk told me he had read online that the whole pressing is defective and that the label would probably not bother to do a second pressing, I decided to live with it, since I already have all but two relatively minor tracks from Disc Three on other CDs in my collection in their full stereo mix. But jeez, this is one bottom o' the budget compilation, I gotta say...