Unidentified subject!

[Karen Newcombe <kln@staralliance.com>]

Peter,

Having thought about it for a few days, I think there are some points that
can be made about HOL that I'd personally hate to see overlooked in favor
of EMI gushing about sales numbers — after all, what's important to us
isn't whether an album sells a billion copies, but how it makes us feel and
what it makes us think.

HOL is not only one of the most ambitious popular music undertakings of the
80's, it is one of the most successful.  The success is layered and
multi-leveled, like the album itself.

First there is the juxtaposition of the Apollonian and Dianic influence —
the bright, driven, outgoing and nearly anthemic Side A placed opposite the
occluded, benthic, inward focus of The Ninth Wave.  A brilliant pairing,
the two sets of music reflect and complement each other.

Secondly there is the sheer genius of musicality: Kate is at a brilliant
point in her mastery of composition. Drawing on the varied musical
traditions she has been exposed to she has distilled an entire world of
music, voice, natural sounds into a sequence of coherent works that tap
directly into the listener's emotional center.  Our hearts soar into orbit
with Kate's voice when she sings "Hello Earth, hello earth, watching storms
start to form over America . . ." One cannot listen to the thrum, thrum,
thrum-thrum-thrum of Cloudbusting without marching forward, so how
appropriate that this song is about the ability of a child to witness the
terrible treatment of his father by the government yet find a way to
continue his own life.  

Which bring us to the content of HOL/TNW.  Kate's content is vastly
ambitious, from the "Side A" exploration of relationships with others such
as love, murder, misunderstanding and negotiation, to the Ninth Wave's dive
into the realms of one's own soul.  No other popular album of the 80's
dared address the depth of content that Kate did.  But it is unfair to
compare other albums with HOL; they simply can't hold up.

Two aspects of HOL deserve more recognition: The Ninth Wave and the
"B-Sides" Kate produced to accompany the singles.  I can't think of another
piece of music in the popular music realm as complex, unified, and complete
as The Ninth Wave.  The Ninth Wave holds up as a remarkable accomplishment
that has always left me wishing Kate would work on more long pieces. 

The "B-Sides" that accompanied the singles for HOL were gems in their own
right: The Handsome Cabin Boy was humorous, My Lagan Love was lovely a
capella, Not This Time had us all tooriyah tooriyoh-ing in time, and then
she hit us with what is possibly the most beautiful song in existence,
Under the Ivy.   As if that wasn't enough, several remarkable remixes of
the singles were made available, including the nearly seven minute
Meteorological Mix of The Big Sky which begins with an Australian
digeridoo, blows a passing kiss at the clouds of Ireland, and ends with
Native American rain chants.   

You almost could not remove a song, a note, a word from the entire album
and have it still hold together.  Like a poem, it is self-contained and
perfect, and the remarkable thing is that Kate has gone on to give us The
Sensual World and The Red Shoes, albums very different in scope and
objective from Hounds of Love, but ultimately informed by what Kate learned
in making Hounds. 

My two cents worth . . .

Karen  

P.S.  Any chance of encouraging EMI to also make the B-sides available?
I'd still like to have a better recording of that RUTH instrumental version.



Karen Newcombe  kln@staralliance.com

I am not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying -- Rainer
Maria Rilke