The Scott Walker documentary is hitting our shores. I’m no Hannah Serrano, but I’ll try to post the trailer. If this doesn’t work, you’ll just have to click above. Sorry.

Walker is one of my favorite pop enigmas. I proposed him as a wild card in Alfredo’s post on great male rock vocalists. Anybody can remember his fantastic voice from ’60s hits like the immortal “Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”. Back then, he was the face of the Walker Brothers, a bunch of American non-siblings not really named Walker who moved to London to be a part of the British invasion. It’s very confusing. Even more confusing was the path this handsome, golden-voiced pop idol’s career would ultimately take. He got into Jacques Brel and made a bunch of dark, baroque solo albums before re-uniting with the Walkers in the ’70s for a few dark folk albums. Since then, he’s holed up and gone on the Malick timeline, releasing an album about once a decade, making himself a cultishly adored avant-cabaret crooner. His last proper full-length, 2006′s The Drift, is one of the most disturbing, uncanny, and strangely beautiful works I have ever heard from a former boy-bander. Yes, it is even better than Robbie Williams’ Millenium and the collected solo works of Justin Timberlake and Bobby Brown.

Here are a few quotes from the rags on Scott Walker: 30th Century Man:

“The ironies of Scott Walker’s career as a pop idol, crooner, poetic songwriter and composer are so rich as to seem genuinely magical. Documentary director Stephen Kijak – formerly best known for the extraordinary study of New York film obsessives Cinemania – understands this completely.”
-Sight and Sound

“Personally, I’ve always found Walker’s dense and challenging soundscapes easier to appreciate on an intellectual level than to listen to. But during his interviews with Kijak during the recording of his 2006 album “The Drift,” Walker comes off as a charming, unpretentious fellow as well as one of the few authentic geniuses in a realm of pompous idiots. Like the best music documentaries, “Scott Walker: 30 Century Man” blends grace and mystery.”
-Salon

“…you’d expect the subject of Stephen Kijak’s documentary to be a forbidding, pretentious artiste—and the pleasant surprise of Kijak’s film is that he’s anything but. Ignore the movie’s occasional heavy-breathing narration and Willy Wonka–esque graphics: In down-to-earth interviews all the more precious for their rarity, the Ohio-born teen idol turned industrial-cabaret innovator comes across not as a Jandek-like eccentric or obscurantist but as a man trying to realize abstract visions through exacting concrete means. And if that means demanding retakes of a percussionist punching a side of meat (for Walker’s 2006 album, The Drift), Kijak lets the results speak eloquently for themselves.”
-Village Voice