Kate in the Wall Street Journal

[nessus (Doug Alan)]

"Pop:  Music for a New Year"
by Pam Lambert
Wall Street Journal 12/30/85

With "Hounds of Love" (EMI), Britain's Kate Bush compellingly stakes her
claim as a major voice in pop music.  On this album, her fifth,  Bush's
craft as a producer has blossomed to match her creative vision.  The result
is at once the artist's most accessible release -- and the brightest sound
I've heard in quite a while.

Bush took two years to make the record.  It shows.  Her four-octave range
and Fairlight synthesizer are the base for impressionistic aural landscapes
that at times swell to orchestral complexity, at others simplify to the
directness of a march.

Though the album opens with the exceptional "Running Up That Hill", whose
loping rhythms made it a natural first single, the second side is the real
showpiece.  A phantasmagorical seven-song voyage through the ebbing
consciousness of a drowning victim, it flows from dreamy numbness to terror
to something approching euphoria.  Which is just what Kate Bush is likely to
leave you feeling.