REVIEW: The Sensual World (The Independent)

[David Osborne <cczdao%clan.nottingham.ac.uk@NSFnet-Relay.AC.UK>]

album review, from "The Independent" newspaper, Friday 20th Oct or
Saturday 21st... (sorry: i was given an incomplete cutting).  note the
reviewer gives the wrong catalogue number, which i think is for the CD
single.
--
			      KATE BUSH
			  The Sensual World
			    (EMI EMD 1010)

For _The_Sensual_World_, Kate reaches once more into her bag of
improving literature and comes up not with Bronte or Gurdjieff but
Joyce, which is a far more entertaining prospect -- especially when,
as on the hit title track, she casts herself as Molly Bloom, yes yes.
This is the over-educated girl become woman in a way that echoes the
hearty Romantic indulgences of her earlier work, and the result is a
complex, deeply-textured body of songs of diverse styles but
cumulative effect.
    The effect of Side One is to leave you like a fly drowning in
honey, a pleasurable surfeit of sweet stimulation which cloys only
when "Reaching Out" verges on the crassly anthemic.  The effect of
Side Two is more emotionally stirring, not least because of the
presence of the voices of the Trio Bulgarka on three tracks, a musical
leitmotif suggesting an almost religious abandon.  Like her friend and
occasional collaborator Peter Gabriel, she re-combines widely
differing strains of "world" music to good effect, be it the matching
of Davey Spillane's whistles, Alan Stivell's Celtic harp and Nigel
Kennedy's violin on "The Fog", or, more sensuous still, the blending
of Spillane's uillean pipes, Eberhard Weber's ghostly electric double
bass and the Trio Bulgarka's ecstatic harmonies on "Never Be Mine".
    Kate believes this to be her "most personal and female album", and
though it's not that far removed from _Hounds_of_Love_, there is a
luxuriance in her musical textures that goes way beyond anything she
has done before.  Listening to _The_Sensual_World_ is rather like
entering a cathedral, which makes a change from her earlier records,
which often felt like entering a convent.

--

dave