New Music November: The Walker Brothers - Nite Flights

It takes a lot for a record to catch me completely off guard. Maybe in all my years of listening to noise and other avant-garde ridiculousness I've become sort of desensitized to weirdness. Despite this, I can't help but feel utterly baffled every time I listen to Nite Flights. The Waker Brothers are already a fairly strange band, despite the "Brothers" gaining some substantial attention in Europe during the British invasion era, they're not brothers, British or even named "Walker" (not a single one of them).  Masterminded by guitarist/vocalist Scott Engel, the Walkers had a pile of top ten hits and disbanded after a few dramatic incidents involving Engel (including an attempted suicide and a stay at a monastery) in 1968.

But they didn't stay broken up for too long, and by the time the seventies rolled around they got back together, but the material was totally different. 1978's Nite Flights is the final album the original trio recorded together, but it plays out much more like a series of loosely connected solo albums glued together. 

The first four tracks are written and sung entirely by Engel, the next two are written by drummer Gary Leeds and the last four by rhythm guitarist John Maus. Engel's tracks have a very eerie, dark tone, indicative of his own personal battles, while the rest of the disc is more in keeping with the pop songcraft the group gained its fame for. Leeds throws jazzy horns into the mix and gives the disc some of its finest hooks and Maus is a more than serviceable songwriter, but the most arresting parts remain Engel's opening quadrilogy. It all sounds so alien, much like David Bowie's mindblowing Low (recorded the year before) but even weirder still. Engel's baritone vocals sound perpetually mournful, even when he sings on later tracks he doesn't really sound like he's getting into the lighter side of things. "The Electrician" runs for six minutes with proto-drone guitar dominating the first and last parts, with a wonderful baroque instrumental interlude, and the art rock-tinged title track manages to rock and baffle in equal measure (eventually ending up covered by Bowie in a fitting tribute). "The Death of Romance" and "Den Haague", the two Leeds tracks, are excellent pop rock tunes, but Engel's voice both sours and enhances them with its melancholy rumble. Maus' tracks suffer a bit less, but probably because his writing isn't too far-removed from Engel's in tone and style.

I enjoy it thoroughly, but I still don't quite get Nite Flights. It's kind of like trying to imagine The Beatles doing Sunn O))) but with saxophones and while it sticks out like a sore thumb in the group's discography of chart-toppers (the only single off this disc, "The Electrician" backed with "Den Haague", failed to chart), it is easily the Walker Brothers disc with the most impressive display of musicality and hopefully it'll one day be widely appreciated as their crowning achievement.