Review of "Hounds of Love"!!!!

[Doug Alan <nessus>]

This is something I just posted to net.music:

From: nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (Doug Alan)
Subject: Review of "Hounds of Love"!!!!
Keywords: Kate Bush's new album

["Know what?  I love you better now."]

I have acquired a copy of an advance tape of Kate Bush's new album
"Hounds of Love", and have had two days to listen to it.  This is going
to be a relatively short review of it.  As soon as I am up to it, I will
post a more detailed review.

"Hounds of Love" is basically two separate and very different but
coherently related albums.  The A side, "Hounds of Love" is (except for
one song) a commercial pop album.  It is excellent -- just about as good
as commercial pop ever gets, but commercial pop only gets so good.  When
I first heard this side of the album, I was very disapointed.  It was
neither what I wanted nor expected from Kate, but it is good enough that
it's difficult to consider complaining too loudly.  "Running Up That
Hill" is typical of the quality of the songs on the A side.

The B side, "The Ninth Wave", is a totally different story.  It is
completely different from, but every bit as good as "The Dreaming"!  It
is a very diverse and unbelievably strange progressive rock collection
of songs that tell the story of a woman who has apparently been
shipwrecked and is floating alone in the water at night, and how this
traumatic experience changes her outlook on life.  The music ranges from
a simple folk-like piano ballad to bizarre progressive rock to strange
compilations of sounds to Aborigine digeridu to backwards vocals and
instruments to dirge-like chants over chilling bass violins to Greek
choruses surrounded with Floydian space music and submarine sounds to a
cheerful ditty to a traditional Irish fiddle jig mixed with an African
drum beat and Burtonesque rap vocals!  It's amazing!  Just completely
indescribably amazing!

One of the songs, "Waking the Witch" even has a part that must have been
sung by Helen Fitzgerald:

	You will burn
	You won't breathe
	Confess to me girl
	Guilty!  Guilty!  Guilty!

Overall, the album is much more happy and positive than anything else
Kate has ever done.  Some of the the songs on the A side are completely
exhuberant.  This is strange, in that it comes right after "The
Dreaming", which is the most pained and frustrated album she has done.
While "The Dreaming" is an album of frustration and pain and fear traced
with hope and love, "Hounds of Love" is an album of love and hope traced
with frustration and pain and fear.

I'm not so wild, in general, about "happy" music, but on "Hounds of
Love" the other elements keep it from becoming too sappy.  Also "The
Ninth Wave" is about a traumatic experience and is often very scary or
very sad or very haunting  -- always touching.

Overall, I don't like "Hounds of Love" as much as "The Dreaming", but
this is largely due to my personal biases (If both sides of the album
were as good as the B side, I wouldn't be writing this article now,
though, because I would have suffered from immediate massive coronary
failure....)  "Hounds of Love" is perhaps, in some ways, a more amazing
album than "The Dreaming" due to the sheer diversity of it contents.  It
has something for everyone.  It will almost certainly be a huge
international success.  It is a work of heart!

			"I still dream of all the love"

			 Doug Alan
			  nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (or ARPA)


P.S.  The release date of the album has been pushed back to September
20, which means you shouldn't expect to see it in any record stores
until September 25.  But if you are in the Boston area and tune into
WMBR (FM 88.10) on Tuesday night (September 10) at 12:30 you might just
get to hear the album.....

P.P.S.  Here are some sample lyrics to whet your appetite (I have no
lyric sheet, so accuracy is not guaranteed):

	Can't you see where memories are kept right?
	Tripping on the water like a laughing girl
	Time in her eyes spawning path light
	One with the ocean and the woman unfurls
	Holding all the love that waits for you here
	Catch us now, fly, and your future
	A kiss on the wind that will make the land
	Come over here to where wind lingers
	Waiting in this empty world
	Waiting for them when lifes break loose
	For now doves right end on the curl of the wave
	And you will dance with me where the sun did pose
	Where of the glowing water and the gone
	We are of water and the holy land of water
	And all that's to come one's end
	Is a question on the strand