To the Reaching Out (Reviews) Table of Contents
New Musical Express - "What Katie
did"
The Scotsman - "When singing turns into a
family affair"
Clash magazine - album review
The Independent - excerpt from "The Week In
Arts"
The Independent - "Kate comes out of the
shadows"
The Big Issue - album review (combined with
a review of a "Texas" album)
New! magazine - album review
Uncut - "Album of the Month"
The Telegraph - "From whence the next
pioneer?"
Maxim - album review
To
the Reaching Out (Reviews) Table of Contents
What Katie did
New Musical Express (NME)
by Alex Needham
She came back to out-weird everyone else again, that's what
Such has been the hullabaloo surrounding this record that, by now, you'd have to be a Kate Bush-style recluse not to know that "Aerial" is the first album in 12 years from one of British pop's true eccentric originals.
The music is a very English kind of soul music that is uniquely hers. We certainly don't get the first half of 'Aerial' on first listen (it's divided into two CDs, "A Sea of Honey" and "A Sky of Honey" . Though "King of the Mountain"'s audacious prog-reggae shows that Bush still sees the world very differently to anyone else - and that her amazing voice is as "wow"-inducing as ever - much of this CD falls short of her best. "Bertie" in particular is sickly, a medieval-style ode to her eight-year-old son. Only the final track, "A Coral Room", is as mysterious and as beautiful as we expect Bush to be. The lyrics mention a drowned pilot, a recurring obsession in her work since "Hounds of Love" (well, if you can count once every 20 years "recurring" .
If the album ended there, you'd sadly conclude that housework and child-rearing had terminally softened Kate Bush's head. Fortunately the second CD saves the day. The strings and electronic pulses of "Prologue" have a cumulative effect so intense it leaves you giddy, Bush's voice combining with bird and whale song to create something so gorgeous it's like drowning in oxygen. "Sunset" alludes to a Bush hero, the classical composer Delius while "Somewhere In Between" is as foggy and autumnal as only Kate can be. "Aerial" is a tour-de-force of chanting vocals, mind-bending sounds that come out of nowhere and lyrics that hit ravishingly romantic highs. It's a triumph - the cares that the whole of this side turns out to be about how birds are actually laughing when they're chirruping?
So, "Aerial" has more than its share of static, but the highs are more than worth the lows.
Tune in and your mind may never be the same again.
7/10
When singing turns into a family
affair
The Scotsman
by Andrew Eaton
November 12, 2005
Sharleen Spiteri of Texas was once asked if she'd ever thought of writing a song
about her daughter. Absolutely not, she replied. "It's something too personal...
it would only be relevant to parents maybe, and that would be a selfish thing to
do." Besides, she added, "are they ever hit records? Nah."
On that last point, she's wrong. Stevie Wonder wrote Isn't She Lovely about his
newborn daughter. Eric Clapton wrote Tears in Heaven about the death of his
young son. Paul McCartney, most famously, wrote Hey Jude for a young Julian
Lennon, then enduring the break-up of his parents' marriage. Self-indulgent
maybe, but all struck a chord with millions of people. Still, you can see
Spiteri's point. There aren't many pop songs - and even fewer good ones - about
parenthood.
But why not? The obvious answer is that most pop stars aren't parents, given
that they're too busy taking drugs, travelling the world and generally being
young and decadent (take out the decadence, and the punishing working hours and
frequent travel are still pretty incompatible with looking after children). Then
again, many are, given that we live in an age when pop careers continue - and,
occasionally, begin - long after 30. Most, though, still take the Spiteri
position. Who wants to dance to a song about changing nappies, daddy-o and
mummy-o?
Here's another view. It's been fascinating, this past week, to listen to the
long-awaited new album by Kate Bush, and to gauge people's reactions. The album
took so long, Bush has explained, because she was enjoying being a mum too much
to get around to finishing it. Since she was so preoccupied with little Bertie,
it's no surprise to find that he's all over Aerial - there are two photos of him
on the sleeve, as well as his drawings (which are rubbish, as children's
drawings usually are, however proud their parents may be). His voice is on there
too, talking cutely about birds at the start of the second CD (this is something
of a Bush tradition, her father and brothers having appeared on previous
records). And, of course, there is the song Bertie, a nursery rhyme tribute
whose lyrics read like Bush was making them up as she went along, while crouched
at his bedside ("You bring me so much joy/and then you bring me... more joy.")
I am a parent myself, and a Kate Bush fan, yet my first, instinctive reaction to
this song was to recoil. It seemed mawkish, self-indulgent, lazy, unworthy of
one of our most innovative songwriters. Writing about a child in this way, after
all, involves no insight, analysis or empathy. It's just gush. And dishonest
gush too - parenthood, as any parent knows, is very far from being uninterrupted
joy, however joyous it can sometimes be.
The more I listen, though, the more Bertie seems carefully considered and proof
that, far from settling into a cosy, musically conservative middle age, as some
reviews have suggested, Bush is as visionary as she always has been, stubbornly
working to her own rules rather than anyone else's. Simple proclamations of
everlasting love are, after all, pop's most common currency; is it any more
dishonest to write them about a child than a boyfriend? To prove the point,
elsewhere on Aerial there is a song called Pi, about a man who is in love with
numbers. Like Bertie, it has no deeper meaning, it's just a love song that's not
about what most love songs are about.
And this is the issue here - what pop songs are allowed to be about. Modern pop
music's roots are in 1950s teenage rebellion, in 1960s counterculture, in the
young reacting against the conservatism of the old, and celebrating how
different from them they are (or think they are). Forty years on, the social
picture is completely different; these days, being a pop star often looks like
just another conservative career choice, in which you work for a big company and
do, say and wear what you're told.
And yet, curiously, pop music clings to the same old rules. It is obsessed with
youth and assumes we are too, to the extent that getting a record deal if you're
over the age of 25 is near impossible (as KT Tunstall recently found to her
intense frustration, until someone went against the grain and proved everyone
wrong). A pram in the hall, in particular, is the sombre enemy of a pop career.
So why write about it?
Except that this is rubbish. Many of the most affecting pop songs are about
family. Think of Sly and the Family Stone's Family Affair, or Pink's Family
Portrait, or, on the other hand, confessions of parental inadequacies by writers
such as Loudon Wainwright. All of these resonate because they're honest. But
what passes for pop music, in general, is not honest. It is about what we'd like
to be rather than what we are, and what we'd like to be is young, rich,
beautiful and free of responsibilities. That's not a bad song to dance to, but
it won't love you in the morning.
Clash magazine
(uncredited)
November 2005 issue
I was born in April 1978. Sitting proudly at number 1 in the UK
charts was a 19-year old newcomer who had burst onto the music scene with a song
inspired by a classic Emily Bronte novel. With "Wuthering Heights", Kate Bush
had just become the first female solo artist in history to secure a Number One.
Spotted at the age of 16 by Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour, who told his record
company EMI to sign her immediately, Kate Bush spent three years expertly honing
her skills before exploding onto the music scene, immediately commanding our
love, and her own self-control over absolutely everything she put her name to.
Assuming co-production duties for 1980's "Never For Ever" she then claimed sole
production rights for "The Dreaming" in 1982 before releasing what many hail as
her classic, "Hounds of Love", and another four albums before taking a break
after "The Red Shoes" in 1993, by which time she was simply revered worldwide.
It's been 12 long years for her fans and the media who forgot her so much so
that nobody knew the she'd had a son in 1998. In 2001 at the Q awards she spoke
of a new album being almost ready, well, 4 years later we finally have it. And
it's her first double album.
The first disc, "A Sea of Honey" has seven songs starting with rousing single
"King of the Mountain" before moving through the album's weakest parts like "Mrs
Bartolozzi", a ridiculous ode about a washing machine using the lyrics "slooshy-sloshy"
repeatedly. These are sandwiched around the cheerier ode to her son "Bertie".
The disc picks up on the fantastic "How To Be Invisible" with its delayed
electric guitar and funk bassline before finishing strongly on the Joan of Arc
inspired string laden drama of "Joanni" and the beautiful piano solo melancholy
of "A Coral Room".
Disc 2, "A Sky of Honey" is a nine-piece conceptual disc that follows a day
through dusk, night and onto dawn. The album's primary themes of nature, light
and laughter are most evident on this disc. The main strength in the
compositions is in Kate's amazing ability like a classic novelist, or artist, to
lyrically paint her scene and setting like no other. She once again joins forces
with Rolf Harris on two tracks talking of turning dark tones to light and
includes beautiful little links and vignettes between songs to make this disc
flow better than the first.
Kate's superbly controlled, wavering voice is older, but it has aged beautifully
and she displays its full range effortlessly, sailing through the avant-garde
and almost theatrical into classical operatic pop. "Aerial" is surely the next
single and is easily the album's best. It is pure "piano, bass and drums" Kate,
building to a crescendo celebration of birdsong and laughter and is the perfect
finish to an album where both discs end on a high note. "Aerial" is as essential
as any of her work and will go down as one of her defining albums, perhaps that
which beautifully defines her career's twilight.
To sum up, there is simply no musical artist in the world like Kate Bush, you
must listen to her work, and when you really listen, you cannot help but love
her.
Excerpt from "The Week In Arts"
The Independent
by David Lister
November 12, 2005
Kate Bush's first album for 12 years, which was released this week, may mark a turning point in pop. It must be the most domesticated set of pop lyrics ever. One track is a paean to the laundry. Probably only Kate Bush could get away with the line: "Slooshy, sloshy, slooshy, sloshy, get that dirty shirty clean." And even she only just gets away with it.
We don't want an avalanche of domestic lyrics. Vacuuming the lounge, putting up shelves and cleaning the toilet aren't generally going to move the senses, stimulate the emotions or get people on to the dance floor.
But Kate Bush has at least shown that domesticity can be "done"
on a rock album without attracting ridicule. In fact, she has attracted rave
reviews, and extended the boundaries of song writing.
So, how should the canny pop lyricists follow Kate? What about gardening? It is
a huge thing in many people's lives. Let's have the gardening rock opera.
Kate comes out of the shadows
The Independent
by Rowan Pelling
October 30, 2005
Oh, she returns! Our lady of the shadows and the raven's wing.
For 12 long years we beat our breasts with nettles and tore at our hair, and the
fruit of the land withered on the vine (apart from the GM stuff, which glowed in
the dark).
And a woman in Totnes gave birth to a stillborn wolf-cub, and the milk turned
sour when we left it near the Aga, and we had to make do with Hounds of Love
because we liked it rather more than The Red Shoes. And now Kate Bush ascends to
her throne on a wind-blasted tor, and - Juno be praised! - there's a new album.
About time, too. I was a carefree 25-year-old when the last Bush album was
released. Back then I could still be persuaded to don a Victorian nightie and
dance around the room to Wuthering Heights if the occasion called for it.
Usually the occasion was pretending to be a contestant on Stars in their Eyes
and I, along with countless other pudding-faced, earthbound females, yearned,
with outrageous incongruity, to be ethereal, witchy Kate Bush. (Although all we
ever resembled was escaped lunatic patients.)
I was struck down like a lovesick puppy at the age of 10 when I first saw Bush
on Top of the Pops in 1978 and I have been fatally afflicted since. This despite
the fact I was, and remain, largely resistant to popular music culture.
Like many women, I never subscribed to the "I listen, therefore I am" NME school
of slavish musical devotion. Yet every now and then a particular voice
penetrates my ear's inbuilt screening system (constructed to repel Dido and
James Blunt). And none has ever provoked such primeval, womb-sprung recognition
as that of Kate Bush.
She joins a select handful of female arts practitioners who seem to express the
very essence of the lunar dreamscape that make up a woman's most private
thoughts; novelists Charlotte Bronté and Muriel Spark, painters Frida Kahlo and
Paula Rego, and poets Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath spring to mind.
Their fans treat them not so much as artists as priestesses of some long-lost
cult of the mother goddess.
What can I say? It's not rational. It's a little bit menstrual. It's a woman
thing. And at least it balances out all those men with speakers the size of
standing stones, worshipping at the shrines of Bob Dylan and Morrissey.
So I was stirred to the entrails when I was told, as a guest on this week's BBC
Radio 4 Saturday Review, that we would be reviewing the new Kate Bush album,
Aerial. I even pulled out my antique linen nightgown: "It's meeee, oh Catheeee,
I've come home..." Then I fretted.
What if Bush were no longer "other", but had become - gulp - circumscribable? I
took a deep breath before donning headphones at the EMI headquarters in London
(the album has been ruthlessly embargoed) and felt a familiar emotion.
How can I describe it? You're balanced on a knife-edge between pure, distilled,
female hysteria and a pierced heart.
Take Mrs Bartolozzi, a song about an obsessively domestic woman with the
repeated refrains "washing machine" and, "Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy/Get that
dirty shirty clean". What's noticeable is how Bush has grown with her fans.
There's less teen witch and more Gaia.
Since we were last summoned to court she has given birth to a son, Bertie, the
inspiration for a song that's probably the only track on the album that will
divide fans: those without children may reach for the sick bucket, while
besotted mothers of small sons will weep with joy at every shamelessly
self-indulgent sentiment. "Lovely, lovely, lovely Bertie," she trills over and
over, before going on: "Here comes the sunshine/Here comes that son of mine."
Frankly, I thought my heart might not take the strain. The same was true of A
Coral Room, with its tenderness and yearning for Bush's dead mother and
capturing of some sub-aquatic quality of fading memory. And the heavy-kohl
brigade will be suitably spine-tingled by How to be Invisible.
As for the second CD, inspired and interspersed by birdsong, tracking the
changing light and weather of a single day, following a painter's eye, taking
you from dawn to dusk, to the sea's shore and beneath the stars, it answered my
feverish heart's prayer.
All we ask of Kate Bush, in the words of Duckie (Kate Bush fan club and "South
London's premiere post-gay pop & performance kinst-disco") is that she's
"eccentric, elusive and very English". The qualities are all mercifully here in
Aerial. All together now: Lovely, lovely, lovely Kate. Lovely, lovely, lovely
Kate.
Build Me Up
The Big Issue
by Chris Cottingham
November 7, 2005
A big build-up often precedes a big disappointment, and vice versa. Call it the
New Year's Eve effect. Or X&Y syndrome. Both venerated singer-songwriter Kate
Bush and grown-up Scottish popsters Texas are about to experience the phenomena,
but from diametrically opposed vantage points.
The hush surrounding Aerial,
Kate Bush's first album in 11, has been nothing short of reverential. The
consensus - formed mainly by men who fantasised about her when they were boys in
the 1980s - sees her as an eccentric genius.
Aerial is expected to be an instant classic.
Ominously it's a double. The opening, King of the
Mountain, is promising, with Bush in brilliant
voice, as is the Bjork-like electronica Pi,
which sees her recite the mathematical constant to 115 decimal places. The
pulsing synths and punchy drums of the closing
Aerial, meanwhile, recall her 1985 hit
Running Up That Hill. In between she spends a
lot of time on her own at the piano, when there's little to distinguish her from
a decade's worth of imitators. It says a lot that even her eccentricities, like
collaborating with Rolf Harris - responsible for the didgeridoo here and on
1982's The Dreaming -
point to an artist treading water. The one thing no-one expected was for this
album to be just okay...
[excised the part of the review of Texas' album here]
...The brooding synths and Spiteri's balletic vocals on
What About Us sound like they could have
appeared on Kate Bush's album - a compliment for Texas, though the same
comparison is rather less flattering to Bush...
[more Texas review excised here]
Both records are solid, though it's hard to get genuinely excited about either
of them. But whereas Kate Bush never stood a chance of delivering on the
hysterical anticipation, Texas benefit from a benign indifference.
New! magazine
(uncredited)
November 14, 2005
(5 stars out of 5)
What do you need to know...
One of the most original artists in pop returns after a 12-year break.
First impressions...
People often bang on about how Kate Bush is bonkers. And, yes, if Girls Aloud
and Robbie Williams is as adventurous as your CD collection gets then her
long-awaited new album will sound like music from another planet. But throughout
her long career, the mother of one, who is now 47, has made some glorious pop
tunes - and that's still the case. Granted, few others are likely to record a
track about Joan of Arc (Joanni) - but songs like Nocturn, A Coral Room and the
title track prove Kate is a true pop genius.
You'll like this if you like... Bjork
Our Favourite track... A Coral Room
Did you know... After 12 years away, Kate says she'll release two albums
next year.
New! verdict... An album which has been worth the wait - this is Kate at
her best.
Album of the Month
Uncut
by Stephen Troussé
December 2005 issue
Serendipitously this month sees the return of the the two last grande dames
of pop. Born just two weeks apart, 47 years ago, there are certain parallels.
Both outlasted early accusations of gimmickry. Both wrested complete unswerving
control over their artistic careers. And both have a sly, instinctive feel for
pop iconography. But while Madonna's presence in the last decade has diminished,
a consequence of her sheer ubiquity, in the same period, without releasing a
single record, Kate Bush's reputation has grown.
Bush's last album, 1993's The Red Shoes, seemed to mark a waning of her powers.
A surface liveliness and a surfeit of collaborators couldn't disguise what was
the most conventional and dispirited record of her career. The strongest songs
('And So Is Love', 'Top Of The City') were the most bitter, while the title
track seemed a parable of exhaustion, of someone condemned to dance and sick of
it.
But in her absence, Bush has maintained a strange currency. Not merely in the
kooky warbling of Tori Amos, the barking cover version of 'Hounds of Love' by
The Futureheads or the lurid bestiaries of Allison Goldfrapp, but at the level
of pop myth. It may be only fitting that a performer so wont to use Romantic
imagery has been cast by rumour in the role of Grand Recluse - the mad woman in
the attic of British pop. a last spectral link to that old Weird England.
The comeback single, 'King Of The Mountain', initially seems to play on such
imagery, with it's bitter winds blowing through desolate mansions. But instead
of a cobwebbed Miss Havisham, it conjures two very different exiles: Elvis
passed away, but kept alive on wishful rumour: and Charles Foster Kane, alone
amid the plunder of Xanadu. Thirty years on from the moment she was signed as a
schoolgirl, and in the words of EMI, 'became a daughter of the company', the
single kicks off Aerial as Bush's quest in search of her own Rosebud, some vivid
essence that got lost down the years.
In its clinking chill and rising storm, the song offers an early, promising sign
that this might be a return to the turbulent emotion of her best work. That
whistling wind has blown all the way down the years of her career. from the wily
moors of 'Wuthering Heights' to the soul storm that broke across The Dreaming
and The Hounds Of Love, and still howled around the bitter fringes of The
Sensual World and The Red Shoes. The promise extends to the structure of the
record, which mirrors that of the epic Hounds Of Love in consisting of two
discs: 'A Sea Of Honey', seven discrete, if not conventionally pop, songs: and
'A Sky Of Honey', a seamless concept suite.
The 'Sea'-side builds on the haunted keynote of 'King Of The Mountain'. 'Mrs
Bartalozzi', a long, meandering washerwoman song over pining piano, strikes
weird bathos with the repeated refrain of 'washing machine'. The closing track,
'A Coral Room', is a more achieved, though no less mournful, ballad, diving down
into a flooded city of memory, where what's left in the calcified chamber of the
heart is a mother's broken jug, which once held milk ' and now holds our
memories'.
The dense, atmospheric trip hop of 'Joanni' seems to cast a rueful glance back,
observing the armoured innocence of a Joan of Arc figure. But when Bush sings
'Who is that girl?', she sounds disgusted at her naivety. On the spooky,
twanging 'How To Be Invisible', she mixes a potion of anonymity from 'eye of
braille, hem of anorak, stem of wallflower and hair of doormat', but finds that
oblivion is no escape.
'Pi' is more upbeat, a wheeling, acoustic, profoundly daft ditty with Bush
testing the critical cliche that she could sing the telephone directory and have
grown men swoon as she croons the number Pi to 25 decimal places. But it's with
'Bertie' that we come to the real heart of the record. A modern madrigal,
complete with renaissance guitar and viol, it's sung to her seven-year old son,
and is the ray of hope this desolate disc has been questing for.
It's a gorgeous, effulgent lullaby and ample testament to the bliss Bush has
clearly found in motherhood. But artistically it feels like a retreat. For all
the positivity, it pales beside the sublime gloom and gales of 'King Of The
Mountain'. nevertheless, pre-release speculation suggested that Aerial's first
disc was almost an afterthought, intended to 'soften the blow' of the mad
ambition and adventure of the second. So perhaps we find the real substance
there.
Bertie himself opens the second half: 'Mummy, Daddy, the day is
full of birds/Sounds like they're saying words'. If 'The Sea Of Honey' side
comprises the sombre Songs of Experience, albeit with one radiant spark of
Infant Joy, 'A Sky of Honey' is one vast rolling Song of Innocence, responding
to desolation with a world brimful of laughter, sunlight and birdsong. In the
tradition of Bush's borrowings from high culture, it seems inspired by Vaughan
William's symphonic 'The Lark Ascending', which in turn was inspired by George
Meredith's eponymous poem, the concluding lines of which may give the album it's
title: 'Till lost on his aerial rings/In light, and then the fancy sings'.
Interspersed in the pastoral ambient style of Virginia Astley, with the sounds
of seagulls, blackbirds and cooing pigeons (who seem to be repeating ' a sea of
honey, a sky of honey') the suite takes us through the course of a summer's day.
Beginning with the ascending piano lines and Michael Kamen's strings of 'A
Lovely Afternoon' ('Prologue'), through the sweetly burbling 'An Architect's
Dream' (featuring a rather twee cameo from Rolf Harris), on to the jazzy
flamenco of 'Sunset' and twilight of 'Somewhere In Between', it steps up a gear
with the euphorically pounding dream sequence of 'Nocturne' ('we stand in the
Atlantic and become PANORAMIC!'), before closing with the giddy aubade of
'Aerial' itself. Along the way, the 'chirrup, whistle, slur and shake' of
birdsong enters a dialogue with, in turn, scat-singing, the chuckles of
children, and finally, full throated guffaws, as BUsh ecstatically realises at
'Sunrise' that 'all the birds are laughing/Come on, let's all join in!'.
This 'Sky' side is frequently gorgeous in its fothering rush ('Who knows who
wrote that song of summer the blackbirds sing at dusk?' she sings with real
wonder on 'Sunset'), while the rousing swell and thunderous vocal of 'Nocturne'
is stunning. But ecstasy is a difficult mood to maintain convincingly.
Cumulatively it can feel like an overlong elaboration of a mood Bush struck much
more succinctly on 'The Sensual World', though without that song's randy langour.
Nevertheless, it's a magnificently quixotic attempt. Aerial is a madly
ambitious, darkly despondant and goofily exuberant grand folly of a record: a
reminder of an eccentric recklessness and grand aspiration so much British pop
has lost.
Kate Bush has found her sunny uplands at last, but you might just wonder if the
creative storm may have finally blown itself out.
From whence the next pioneer?
The Telegraph
by Sarah Crompton
November 16, 2005
Sarah Crompton asks: where is the next Madonna, and the new
Kate Bush?
I'm beginning to worry about Madonna. It all started at Live8 when she did all
that unnecessary swearing - an attempt, I felt, to prove how transgressive and
happening she still was.
On the trailblazers: where will the next Kate Bush come from?
But she needn't have bothered; because as soon as she started to sing, her
back-catalogue spoke for itself, challenging everybody to join in and have a
good time.
Then I saw her on Parkinson last Saturday and felt really concerned. She's too
thin, for one thing; her head suddenly looks too large for her slight frame. And
her clothes - those supertight trousers, that sleeveless T-shirt and gloved hand
- brought the words mutton and lamb to mind.
This can be written off as envy, of course. I knew from the moment that I saw
her cavorting in pink hot pants on the cover of her new album that she and I had
reached some kind of parting of the ways. Pink hot pants are beyond your average
fortysomething mother of two; they are certainly beyond me.
Yet, once again, her music does her showing off for her. Confessions on a Dance
Floor is a terrific album, a disco concoction full of catchy, danceable tunes
and the kind of assertive buoyancy that many of her more self-consciously trendy
albums of the past few years have failed to produce.
So what, you might think. But Madonna matters, as I have said before, because to
a generation of women she represents all kinds of aspirations of freedom,
self-reliance and the power to control life on her own terms.
Oddly enough, Confessions on a Dance Floor finds itself released at the same
time as another album by a female pop idol who has built her career and her life
exactly as she wanted. Like Madonna, Kate Bush is 47, and still strikingly
beautiful, though you are unlikely to find her in hot pants.
They are, spookily, more or less the same height - 5ft 3in and 5ft 4in. And in
the early '80s they produced a new kind of template for what a woman pop star
could be: empowered and empowering, innovative and inspiring.
There the similarities end. While Madonna wanted fame one way or another, Bush
was obsessed with music in its own right; where Madonna's life has become more
and more of an open book (with another documentary about her out on Channel 4
next month), Bush has preserved enough privacy to be regarded as an enigma.
Confessions on a Dance Floor is about love, power and fame. Kate Bush's Aerial,
in contrast, is about smaller and less often hymned pleasures: the minutiae of
domestic life where washing machines whir round, holding a loved one's clothes;
the joy of having a child; the sound of birdsong; the sadness of losing a
mother. Madonna talks a lot about her love for her family; Bush actually sings
about it.
In that sense, she directly addresses the lives of her first fans, providing
reflections on growing up, while Madonna deftly avoids the questions and glides
back across the dance floor. There is no doubt that Aerial is an album of great
beauty and haunting originality - definitely worth waiting 12 years for.
Yet listening to both albums in my own kitchen the other day, I found I couldn't
in the end choose between them. I love Bush's home truths, but her whimsy pales
over a double album; I wish Madonna would act her age, but the exuberance of her
disco beats propels me across the floor in sheer delight.
Both albums have a kind of confidence that seems rare in pop today. And when I
think back, I am struck by how many original female voices pop spawned at around
that time: not only Bush and Madonna, but Annie Lennox, Patti Smith, Debbie
Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde and others stood centre stage and claimed
the right to be heard on their own terms.
I might be missing something but today's female pop stars seem manufactured and
bland in comparison. Kylie, Gwen Stefani, even Alison Goldfrapp just don't seem
to have the originality or the blazing conviction that Madonna and Kate Bush
have always displayed. They continue to shine, but their legacy has, in pop
terms at least, simply not been fulfilled.
Maxim
December 2005 issue
(4 stars out of 5)
After 12 years spent in reclusive wilderness, Kate Bush
is back...with Rolf Harris!
WHAT'S THE STORY?
Mrs. Eccentric returns after 12-year hiatus to make 2-discer full of soothing
pop/prog. oddness.
TO BE HONEST:
Allegedly recorded in pastoral fields, 183 miles south of Narnia, and mixed by
magical monks with little peacocks copulating in harmonious ecstacy, while
charcoal grey cherubs dance haphazardly and...
IN ENGLISH PLEASE:
It's all a bit strange, but very good.
LISTEN OUT FOR:
Rolf Harris playing didgeridoo. Seriously.
"The pull and the push of it all..." - Kate Bush
Reaching Out
is a
Marvick - Hill
Willker -
Mapes
Fitzgerald-Morris
Grepel - Love-Hounds
Presentation