4AD

Musical trajectories don’t come much odder than Scott Walker’s, in both arc and destination. Taking the name “Walker” when joining the vanilla boy-pop trio the Walker Brothers in 1964, the man born Scott Engel discovered, by turn, Jacques Brel, discophonic surreality (see 1978’s Nite Flights ) and, by the mid-‘90s, epically unfolding theater for the ear. Bish Bosch begins with an insistent doom-rock tom-roll and Walker’s a cappella Van Dyke Parks-like wordplay about “plucking feathers from a swan song,” and it’s off to wonderland. Mostly, the drums come in short bursts or not at all, the album’s otherworldliness remaining undiminished through horn cascades and finger snaps ( “Epizootic” ), redemptive dream-floats ( “Dimple” ) and 21-minute half-symphonic WTFs ( “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” ).