View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2006 CD release of In 5 Easy Pieces on Discogs. Someone at Universal is having a laugh. Five Easy Pieces? This is surely the most ironic title of the year. Microsoft reporting winforms missing assembly reference page. Despite the former Scott Engel's exemplary crooning ability and his propensity for loungey arrangements, his was never an easy career to sum up.

Scott 4 US Release: 1969-11 UK Release: 1969-11 Label: Philips Mendelsohn: Sometimes when I’m bored, I’ll just scroll through the Great List, looking for names I don’t recognize. That’s why this week we will be talking about Scott Walker’s Scott 4., Scott 4 is not exactly canonical but it was high enough on the list to make me wonder about the record. Might as well check it out. Turns out I stumbled into one of the weirder music careers on record. Scott Walker (real name Noel Scott Engel) got his start in the '60s with the band the Walker Brothers (composed of a couple of guys whose real last names weren’t Walker either). The Walker Brothers were huge in England, where their middle of the road sound went down like warm milk -- a sort of antithesis to the Beatles’ effervescent reimagining of rock music. Scott then went solo, found even more success recording standards, before fizzling out toward the end of the decade.

Interestingly, Scott 4 -- released in 1969 -- was a commercial flop. The album is comprised of material written entirely by Walker but was released under his real name.

All subsequent re-releases have been rebranded with the Walker moniker. After a short and mildly successful reunion with the Walker Brothers in the '70s, Scott departed on a solo path that would see him become one of the world’s foremost avant-garde composers.

These days he makes some weird, weird music, often accompanied by weird, weird videos. His signature baritone is still there, though, which is nice.

My first couple of runs through Scott 4 had me scratching my head. Was this album really worth listening to? Is anyone going to still be listening to it in 20 years? Why is anyone listening to it now? Why am I listening to it now? After a while I sort of just stopped thinking about and found myself enjoying Walker’s signature baritone, schmaltzy backing vocals, sweeping orchestration and all.

I’m on board. And I will be subjecting everyone I know to Scott Walker’s beautiful MOR stylings. What do you think, Klinger:?

Is Scott 4 still worth listening to? Klinger:: That's a tough one to call, since no one especially listened to this record when it first came out, and only marginally more people have gotten around to listening to it since. I know that, as an inveterate Mojo reader for more than a decade, I've had Scott Walker on my radar for quite some time but it's taken your persuasion to getting around to listening to him. And it's been quite the shock to the system. My first several runs through the album had be thinking that this sounds like Andy Williams Sings the Leonard Cohen Songbook.

I'm still finding my footing even now. You're really too young to remember the notion of easy listening music, but there was a time when there was always that one radio station that played (what our local station WLQR called) Music for the Good Life. And it was everything that people who liked rock 'n' roll were trained to hate. So the first blast of Herb Alperty trumpet blasts through on 'The Seventh Seal', my ears immediately seize up on me.

Supports DOS, Linux, FreeBSD (including Debian/kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, anything Solaris-like, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like OSes as well as GNU Hurd. Partial Windows support is available (no internal programmer support at the moment, hence no 'BIOS flashing'). • Portability. Flashtool-0.9.22.3-windows.exe.

But here's the thing: everything tells me that this record has a lot to offer. People I trust stand by it. I can tell that the lyrics are at least as smart as other records from the late '60s that I admire. But the fact that so much of the music sounds like it could be performed on The Carol Burnett Show is confusing my senses. Help me figure this out, Mendelsohn.

Walk me through it. Mendelsohn: I have no idea. Honestly, I was hoping you would have been able to provide a little more insight into this record and its placement on the Great List as you have a greater love for the music of the '60s than I do.

But if the blind must lead the blind, please take my hand and watch out for that first step -- it’s a doozy. I like the cinematic sweep of Scott 4. There is a majestic, operatic quality to the record that is completely different from the wail of rock 'n' roll. It starts with the opening track of “The Seventh Seal” as Walker recounts, in rather astonishing detail, the events of Igmar Bergman’s 1957 film of the same name. For the most part, the rest of Side A is straight ahead balladry, the type that makes most rock purists cringe (and I still do from time to time) but Walker is such a deft artist that it’s hard not to get behind his vision, especially when he starts to sneak little bits of rock, funk and country into his songs.