Scott Walker and Sunn 0)))’s dark ‘Soused’: Judge it for yourself

Hardened, mesmerizing and residing within a realm “where no worm squirm,” British crooner Scott Walker’s collaboration with drone metal band Sunn 0))) is the darkened experimental underground’s equivalent of Lou Reed working with Metallica. Except that “Soused” makes “Lulu” seem like a collection of Top 40 ditties.

On the surface, it’s an unlikely pairing. Walker’s work in the late 1960s as a member of the British-based vocal group the Walker Bros. gave way to a sonic descent into difficult, visceral experimental music after the trio’s dissolution. At times, Walker’s work is a drag, music that will baffle your lover and alienate you from the optimists that populate your life’s sunlit porches.

“A beating will do me a world of good,” declares Walker in operatic wail to open “Brando” with dramatic flair. Whips crack and drone roams. Walker is colloborating with the proper two masters of darkness, Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson.

“Herod 2014” starts with the measured, repetitive clang of a railroad crossing signal, which seems to morph into the beep of a heart monitor and extends through 12 minutes of heaving din. Downtuned, distorted guitars hum and shift amid shatters of static. “Fire-ant necklace,” sings Walker, then, later, “Woke up nailed to a cross / Could not give a toss.” Good morning.

Rating the success of “Soused” in the context of a star system is as ridiculous as ranking the relative happiness of one of Mark Rothko’s “multiforms” paintings. Will it infuriate you? Probably. Many, in fact, would deny that “Soused” is proper music at all. But listened with requisite volume and focus, a track like “Lullaby,” which closes the album, will utterly change your environment and put you in a head space so far removed from musical safety as to feel destabilizing. And that’s a noble endeavor.

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Scott Walker and Sunn 0)))

“Soused”

4AD Records

No stars out of four (for pure darkness)