Scott Walker's third solo recording--album titles were never really his strong suit--is an uneven but engaging work, illustrative of the career quandary that Walker, still in his mid-20s, was trying to reconcile. He clearly saw himself as tortured, anguished performer-poet, an ombudsman of angst whose early glimpses of fame and fortune had alerted him to the essentially hollow nature of this existence, and so on. Meanwhile, an awful lot of excitable young girls continued to see him as that handsome blonde bloke with the big deep voice off the telly. On Scott 3, he is most guilty of trying to live up to both sets of received wisdom. For the first time, the overwhelming majority of the songs are Walker's own--all of them, in fact, other than two by his hero Jacques Brel, and the overblown take on "If You Go Away" that closes this record is not one of Walker's better Brel interpretations. He still seems to be finding his way as a writer, lurching between the unarguably perfect ("Big Louise", "It's Raining Today", "We Came Through") to the somewhat perplexing (most of the rest of it). Even at his least satisfying, however, Walker is still more intriguing than most. --Andrew Mueller