This was surely a nice concept, and one that might be ripe for a reboot in the year of our Lord 2026: inviting people to write a song based on one of the ten plagues of Egypt. Unfortunately, little thought seems to have been put into the selection of the invitees, as it groups a lot of artists with no common aesthetic ground (throwing any measure of overall cohesion out the window) and most with hardly a personal outlook on, or an aesthetic affinity for, its thematic focus on biblical gore, which leaves us with the sole option of approaching it one song at a time, with preferences surely going this way or that depending on your previous artistic affiliations.
For me, there is some ok stuff by people I didn't know (King Creosote and Cody Chesnutt) or wouldn't have expected much more from (Rufus Wainwright and The Tiger Lillies); some merely ok stuff by people I'd always expect more from (like Brian Eno with Robert Wyatt (whose mimicking of flies flying around is the first thing I might have preferred not to hear come out of his mouth), and Laurie Anderson); and some not so ok stuff by people I had never heard of before and will possibly never hear from again, and also by Stephin Merritt, who I probably would have pretended not to know of if I saw him turning out this number in public.
All said and done, the only thing most people can and should agree on is that Scott Walker was the only one who truly rose to the challenge, taking a unique stab at some sort of gospel straight out of hell (there's a twist for you), and which is all the more impressive by being one of the starkest pieces from his late period; one that, for (almost) once, eschews orchestras, rock instruments, power tools and torture implements altogether. If you didn't know it before, you do now: a choir in need of an exorcism and a tambourine - that's all the man ever needed to put the fear of God into you.
