Scott Walker

American-born Noel Scott Engel moved to England in the early '60s and became a teen idol as a third of the Walker Brothers (their big hit was "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore"). By the time they split up in 1967, though, Scott was less David Cassidy than Ingmar Bergman: On the five early solo albums excerpted on It's Raining Today, he'd become devoted to the emotion-wracked, hyperserious songs of Jacques Brel (Walker's originals were along the same lines) and surrounded his lugubrious baritone with bombastic orchestral arrangements that haven't aged well. Remarkably, the kids stuck with him: His version of Brel's "Jackie" is probably the only '60s chart hit whose chorus includes the word "stupid-ass," and his British fan club was bigger than the Beatles'.

Walker's only other American release is the impenetrable Tilt, written in the early '90s and originally released in the U.K. in 1995. It's overwhelmingly dark and ambitious, musically and lyrically, but it's hard to get past Walker's vibrato-soaked baritone, which comes off like Berlin-era David Bowie in an 8-foot-deep vat of margarine. And the album is top-heavy with pretentious abstraction, self-consciously difficult and often actively unpleasant. (DOUGLAS WOLK)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide