Q Magazine review of The Red Shoes

[nbc@inf.rl.ac.uk]

The November issue of Q Magazine has a review of The Red Shoes. For those
interested it is shown below. Elsewhere in the mag they also have a copy
of a clipping from an unnamed British newspaper which claimed that Kate
was provisionally booked to appear at the Savoy nightclub in Clacton
depending on how well Rubberband Girl did! For those in the US who
don't know where Clacton is - don't worry neither do most people in
the UK! Unlikely to have any substance.

There is also a full page ad in Q for the new album featuring part of the
front cover and thumbnail pics of all the other albums.


Neil

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                           SHELTERED

Kate Bush balancing precariously between spiritual and flossy-headed.

Initially somewhat shrill and unimpressive, The Red Shoes improves immeasurably
after repeated plays over a long period of time, gaining solidity at odds with
disparate musical strategies. Though it opens with the unassuming, direct singleRubberband Girl - Bush lamenting her inelasticity and finding some compensation
in vocal bungee-jumping on the coda - it soons finds its natural centre with
And So Is Love, the first of several tracks dealing, in an unfocussed,
woolly-mystical manner, with the connections between love and the abstract,
spiritual nature of creativity. Eric Clapton chips in a few taut guitar stabs
over a gentle keyboard pulse, while Bush asks vague rhetorical questions: "And
whatever happens/What really matters?/It's all we've got/Isn't that enough?",
that sort of thing.

It's her most relegious album: "Your name is being called by sacred things/That
are not addressed nor listened to/Sometimes they blow trumpets," she claims on
Big Stripey Lie, a rhythmic sound-collage on which the fiddling poltroon Nigel
Kennedy contributes deft strokes. He's also on Top of the City, where Bush's
Achilles heel, her sheltered sensitivity, is paradoxically her greatest
strength: "I don't know if I'm closer to heaven, but it looks like hell down
there". From anyone else this would seem a blandly cynical acknowledgement of
supposed urban spiritual barrenness but her very unworldliness gives it an odd
authenticity.

The same is almost true of Moments Of Pleasure, the closest the album comes to
old-style Kate Bush, with solo piano, string arrangement and whimsy overload
carrrying a private lyric whose impenetrable references to "Teddy, spinning in
the chair at Abbey Road" and her mother's contention that "Every old sock finds
an old shoe", renders the song too solipsistic to transmit beyond her immediate
circle.

Eat The Music is a jolly trifle which blends South American flavours, courtesy
of Justin Vali and Paddy Bush's rhythmic valiha guitars, with a general
township-jive bounce, as Kate stretches a frankly baffling fruit/sex/music
metaphor to snapping point. The ethnic style seems corny here, as opposed to
the title track, which uses the valiha as the hypnotic heart of an insistent
rolling rhythm in which Paddy's "musical bow" adds didgeridoo-like
reverberation, and his whistles a celtic jig flavour.

It's the album's most fulfilled piece, and a more convincing application of the
spiritual theme than the flossier-headed notions - mainly courtesy of George
Gurdjieff - which litter Lily and The Song Of Soloman. Bush says in the latter,
"Don't want your bullshit/Just want your sexuality" - though she seems to have
an apparently boundless appetite for the former.

Along with Clapton and Kennedy, there is a distinguished cast adding their
signatures to selected trakcs. As before, The Trio Bulgarka add their
open-throat harmonic poignance to a number of songs, including the closing
You're The One, on which Jeff Beck, tense as ever solos and Procol Harum
organist Gary Brooker pours waves of whiter-shade-of-Hammond organ into the
chorus - so effectively that Bush is driven to quote a line from that most
evocative song.

The most full-bloodied collaboration of all is Why Should I Love You? -
co-arranged with Prince, who does most of the rhythm section and chips in
backing vocals along with The Trio Bulgarka and, er, Lenny Henry. In an album
dominated by the idea of "soul" as a creative force, this track comes closest
to the actuality of soul as a musical style.

As a whole, The Red Shoes is more musically varied than thematically, as Bush's
constant returning to the links between love, spirituality and creativity
become wearing. In compensation, there's a rich pan-global tapestry woven here
in which the textures and designs from distant cultures are being used not for
effect, but for the way they express an emotional truth beyond mere words.

***
Andy Gill