Bleep

With a lifetime spanning career in music, beginning back in the 60s as part of the pop group The Walker Brothers, Scott Walker has been through several artistic turning points over the years. Gradually breaking away from his slew of vocal pop & rock albums on Philips, he slowly but steadily began to show his talents for crafting looser, more avant-garde leaning compositions. His last decade has been spent signed to 4AD, including 2014s collaborative LP with doom rockers Sunn O))).

With The Childhood of a Leader, we are presented with Walker’s first soundtrack work in over fifteen years, and with a 40+ strong string and brass orchestra at his control he helps to accentuate the vision set by Brady Corbet in his directorial debut. Revolving around the treaty of Versailles and the life of a young boy in the post-WWI era Paris, some parts of Walker’s score are as tense and hyper-dramatic as you would expect, and the typical soundtrack titles leave little to the imagination when it comes to guessing their purpose. A far cry from his formative years, The Childhood of a Leader shows the level of professional accomplishment Walker has reached at this point in his life. We haven’t seen the film yet but we can safely assume that this soundtrack will play a large part in its visceral authenticity.