Review of _TSW_, from _JHU News-Letter_

[megadude <@JHMAIL.HCF.JHU.EDU:megadude@JHUNIX.BITNET>]

Here's another review of KaTe's new album, this time from the pages of the
November 3rd issue of the "Johns Hopkins News-Letter".  It is followed by a
nice review of Jane Siberry's _Bound By The Beauty_, but I'm not going to
type it in unless someone wants me to (no time, no time!)  It's also
accompanied by a picture of the album cover (probably the LP) sporting the
caption "Kate Bush on the cover of 'The Sensual World'" (descriptive, eh?).
     
On to the review:
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               Kate Bush's Exhilarating "Sensual World"
                       by Mark W. Stewart
     
     
        "Mmh yes/Then I'd take the kiss of seedcake from his
         mouth/Going deep down South, go down, mmh, yes."
     
        That Kate Bush opens her new album, "The Sensual World," with
such provocative declarations signals something of a change in her lyrical
outlook.  In the past, Bush tended to couch the charged eroticism of her
work in metaphors that gave a sense of distance.  Her perchant for
fantastical settings, musical and lyrical, is less indulged on "The
Sensual World": such songs as "Love and Anger", "This Woman's Work", and
the title track (quoted above) actually reach a level of realism
characteristic of a writer like Elvis Costello.
     
        At age thirty, after five albums of eccentric pop art, Bush seems
anxious to abandon the life of the kinky spinster, intent on "stepping out
of the page...where the water and the earth caress" and discovering "the
powers of a woman's body."  While the title track combines sexual liberation
with coy come-ons (cleverly paraphrased from the closing pages of James
Joyce's "Ulysses"), the album's first single, "Love and Anger," considers
contradictory human motivations - the danger of "opening up" to one's lover
and the intense desire to do just that.  After seducing a man in the
previous song, here it's as though Bush is abruptly seized with self-doubt.
She conveys the resultant tensions via an array of bristling electric guitar,
trap drum kits, hugely ambient Irish hand drums, and massed vocal
harmonies, creating a mix more dense and harrowing than anything since
1982's hysteric "The Dreaming".
     
        It's an exceptionally mature (read: confused) perception, especially
in contrast with "The God", which, while equally focused, seems something
of a lyrical step backward.  Featuring some of Bush's most exquisite
orchestral writing (arranged by Michael Kamen), the song seems more in the
spirit of the childhood themes of her previous album, "Hounds of Love".
Indeed, with its Cinemascope-style production and oceanic sound effects,
"The Fog" is in essense a very lovely rewrite of that album's "Hello
Earth."
     
        A more thematically connected song, "Deeper Understanding,"
provides one of the album's true high points.  One of the three songs
featuring the magnificently non-Western harmonies of the Trio Bulgarka -
Yanka Rupkhina, Eva Georgieva, and Stoyanka Bovena - "Deeper Understanding"
provides an apt insight into Bush's change in attitude.  "As the people here
grow colder/I turn to my computer/And spend my evenings with it/like a
friend," she sings, depicting a character who seems almost the opposite of
the one who began the album with such lewd thoughts.
     
        Yet one gets the feeling that the "deeper understanding" the woman
seeks won't be found in the architecture of computer software, but in
the warmth of the physical - sensual - world.  Certainly, it's a leap of logic
to make such assumptions; Bush has never abided by any of the programmatic
notions common to that 70s' anachronism, the concept album.  But the sense
of place, mood, and continuity that Bush develops through the album's
eleven songs invites the listener to take part.
     
        Among other things, the 80s will be remembered as the decade in which
electronic instruments - the digital sampler particularly - became primary
sources of musical development.  Classicists have accused electronics
of removing the human element from the craft of making music.  To the
contrary, an impressive amount of time and thought is required to provide
synthesized sounds with the harmonic richness, expression, and warmth of
more traditional instruments.
     
        So rather than spend her time in such pursuits, Kate Bush
developed a sound fusing traditional acoustic, rock-and-roll electric,
and electronic modes and instrumentation.  To say that "The Sensual
World" is only the latest refinement of that sound would be true, but
a serious understatement.
     
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|  "I throw grammar out the window  |      megadude@jhunix.uucp      |
|    and laugh hysterically as it   |     megadude@jhunix.bitnet     |
|       hits the ground"  - Me      |   megadude@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu  |
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