Then there’s Scott Walker, the former pop star — now in his ‘60s — making the most terrifying music you’ve ever heard in your life. Being his age, and having been no stranger to the pop charts, there’s something very genuine about his current tormented music and morbid obsessions. It is no mere teen search for identity, but a deep plumbing of the twisted and paranoid psyche of an aging celebrity. His former group, the Walker Brothers (none of whom were actually brothers or named Walker), often competed with the Beatles and the Stones for the title of Britain’s favorite pop group. Since then, Scott Walker has retreated into himself, becoming something of a reclusive Nick Cave or Tom Waits-type character: a dark and eccentric crooner, putting out startlingly idiosyncratic records full of obscure pains and macabre fantasies.

His first record in over a decade, The Drift is the auditory equivalent of watching David Lynch’s Eraserhead, alone … in the dark. The whole idea is to upset, disorient, and shock, and the album succeeds in taking Walker’s gothic fixations to a new level of focus and intensity. If you can remember a time when ‘goth’ had nothing to do with nu-metal or those kids in over-sized pants, then you can surely appreciate the tradition that Walker is drawing on as he pulls in bits of early surrealist cinema, Romantic literature, and the avant-garde wings of both modern classical and rock music.

Full of violent lyrics, broodingly tortured vocals, nauseating string sections, dissonant guitars, long stretches of near-silence, disorienting effects and intentionally irritating noises (including what sounds like heavily labored breathing, CD skips, creeping footsteps, and tortured animals), The Drift may be a hard sell for some — for most, even. Myself, I absolutely hated the first time I listened to this album. Its unrelentingly dark atmosphere is visceral and all-consuming, and its 70-minutes of quivering vocal pain was simply too much to take. I don’t know why, but I listened to it again. And then again. And again. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before. Sure, it is still a torturous listen, but for those willing to endure Walker’s exceptionally personal pain, to find beauty in his extreme ugliness, then The Drift is something of a dark masterpiece.

Right from the start, opener “Cossacks Are” lets you know exactly what you’re in for: a dissonant guitar line hangs in the air while screeching insects pan from speaker to speaker. Then enters Walker’s wet, quivering baritone, a bit like Joy Division’s Ian Curtis with some surprising operatic overtones. The song sets up the basic pattern of every song: slow, empty verses delivered in a silent, throbbing wilderness followed by startling eruptions of shrieking, horrific sound.

At one point in its 12-minute running time, “Clara” has a woman, presumably Benito Mussilini’s lover, prettily singing over wet meat being randomly slapped and beaten while a stereo somewhere shreds a cassettes tape. There is no conceivable scenario where these three things, seemingly disconnected from each other, would happen in the same room at the same time — and if there is, I sure as hell don’t want to know about it. As if to explain, Walker proclaims, “Dipped in blood in moonlight / Like what happened in America,” before being obliterated by a mutilated string section. “Psoriatic” has Walker moaning about “anthrax Jesus” over the sound of a dull saw slowly splitting wood or bone.

Then, things get strange. “Jesse” is a portrait of Elvis singing to his stillborn twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, about 9/11 and the fall of the twin towers. Seriously. Quote a terrified Walker singing unaccompanied and shaking uncontrollably on the verge of tears, “I’m the only one left alive / I’m the only one left alive / I’m the only one left alive.”

“Jolson and Jones” has what sounds like a donkey being stripped of its flesh over an orchestra played by the tone-deaf. As shocking and abrasive as this is, the next moment is even creepier: uneven footsteps in the distance; a snake-charmer’s squeaking Arabic flute. “Hand Me Ups” features one of the most startling moments of the entire album, as a woman’s scream seamlessly becomes a shrieking sustained violin note and then an atonal plastic toy trumpet.

A rating is almost pointless with this type of album, it earns either the highest score or the lowest. The quality of modernism, of the avant-garde itself, defies an easy appraisal of quality. The album even descends into self-parody at certain points — like the demented Donald Duck at the climax of “The Escape,” or when Walker sings of “the pee-pee soaked trousers”, or the random “psst pssts” of “A Lover Loves” — but every second is a startling surrealist nightmare of an old man’s nightmares. You may not understand The Drift, hell, you may not even like it very much, but it is absolutely essential: the bravest, strangest record of 2006, completely unlike anything you have ever heard. It is like staring into the void.