To the Reaching Out (Reviews) Table of Contents
Geelong Advertiser - "A long wait for Kate"
Melbourne Herald-Sun -
"Something from Kate"
The Sunday Telegraph - "Babooshka Kate Is Missing
Again"
The Australian - album
review
The Age - album review
The Adelaide Advertiser -
"Gone Bush"
Sydney Morning Herald - "Domestic
goddess of song"
Sydney Morning Herald - "Domestic
goddess of song"
The Brisbane Courier Mail - album
review
Melbourne Herald Sun - "Bush is on
fire again"
Melbourne Sunday Herald - album
review
Melbourne Age - "What Kate Did Next"
The Drum Media - album review
To
the Reaching Out (Reviews) Table of Contents
A long wait for Kate
Geelong Advertiser
October 1, 2005
Shane Wright is a Kate Bush tragic. This week, Bush released her first new music
in 12 years. Wright explains what it is about the English songstress that had
her fans holding their breath.
There are now wiley, windy moors across southern NSW. It's even tougher finding
a Heathcliff and a Cathy - and there's definitely no Wuthering Heights. But it
was there, in my early teens, that I fell in love with the music of Kate Bush.
Two decades on, and the voice of Kate Bush is about to return to the world's
airwaves. The close-knit Kate Bush community has been abuzz all year that their
heroine would break 12 years of silence and release a new album. The wait is
almost over.
Her first single since the Red Shoes album of 1993, King of the Mountain, was
played on British radio this week. The response to the single in some of the
world's music chatrooms gives you and idea of the devotion of Kate Bush fans.
"Well, I'm sitting here with a friend of mine who actually started crying after
he heard King of the Mountain," one wrote. "I don't know what to make of
it...it's like a holiday. It's like...nothing I've ever experienced before."
Another enthused: "It keeps growing and getting even better. I wonder if or
where this obsession will stop. It's hypnotic."
Early signs of Bush obsession appeared. One person admitted to listening to the
song 59 times in the 10 hours or so after it was first aired on BBC2.
But will the music of Kate survive the 21st century? In the 12 years since Bush
released her last album, music and the music industry has changed dramatically.
Bruce Springsteen has managed to split from the E Street Band, reform it, and
then go solo again. Britney Spears has had an entire career - and a baby - since
she asked to be hit one more time. Madonna has gone from erotica to motherhood.
There were no American, British or Australian idols clogging up the radio
airwaves. It was a time before iPods, web pages and DVDs. And Michael Jackson
was still known for his music rather than his court appearances.
Australian music guru Glenn A. Baker remembers fondly an interview he conducted
with the "beguiling" Bush back in her then south London flat in the early 1980s.
Bush was discovered by Pink Floyd member Dave Gilmour in the early 1970s, before
she was taken under the wing of record label EMI. Baker says EMI did what today
is almost unthinkable - it gave Bush time to develop her talents. She delivered,
releasing Wuthering Heights at a time when punk was marching across British
carts.
"Record companies gave people three or four albums to develop. Nowadays, they
give people two or three singles before they're dropped," he said.
Baker ranks Bush as one of the more important female contemporary musicians of
our time. "She's one of the strong female performers out of the 1980s and 1990s,
and she was one of those who proved that women are not just ornaments to the
music," he said. "And she was one of the few who was as good behind the mike as
in front of it."
So what is it about Kate Bush that draws such strong opinions from fans and
critics alike? It could be the focus on rhythm, her use of synthesizers, the
at-times obscure lyrics, or just about the entire musical package. This is a
woman who has covered so many issues in her music - from incest to nuclear
annihilation to the plight of the Aborigines - and adopted a range of images to
portray it.
On the cover of The Dreaming album, she portrays herself as the wife of Harry
Houdini, delivering a key on her tongue to the great escapeologist. On the
Hounds of Love, she became Shakespeare's Ophelia. And ten there's the links from
literature, most memorably started with Wuthering Heights, but progressing to
Molly Bloom, from James Joyces masterpiece, Ulysses.
But back in Cootatarnundra, sitting as it does on the banks of the Muttarna
Creek in southern NSW, all this imagery meant nothing to this (then) young
teenager.
It was the music that drew me in - and maybe the outfit she wore in the
Babooshka video. As my university flatmate - and Bush fan - once told me, Kate
just sings unlike any other person.
Already it appears Bush will find success with her new album.
King of the Mountain went straight to the top of Britian's hot 100 CD singles,
just hours after it appeared on radio and four weeks before it goes on sale.
In Australia, the last big chart performance by Bush was back in 1991 when her
cover of Elton John's Rocket Man went to number two. But have the music lovers
of the world moved on, ready to ditch a woman who has influenced and changed
music so much during her years in the business? Me, along with thousands of
other Kate Bush fans, don't care.
The world could be listening on their MP3 to Kelly Clarkson, or downloading the
latest mobile ring tone, but I'll be waiting for that voice that sounds like an
angel floating in the fog of a British moor. Other music doesn't matter.
As one chatroom member said this week: "Oops...Kate did it again...eat your
heart out Britney, Kate is going for the real stuff! Shivers all over,
goosebumps all over...Worth the waiting!"
Something from Kate
Melbourne Herald-Sun
September 5, 2005
Singer Kate Bush will release her first album in 12 years in November - a double album entitled Aerial. It will follow with a single, King of the Mountain, out in October. Both the single and the album were produced by Bush herself, the BBC reports.
The 47-yer-old performer's last album, The Red Shoes, was released in 1993 and was the soundtrack to a short-lived Broadway show [huh? -ed]. Her last public appearance was in 2001, when she received Q magazine's "classic songwriter" award in London.
Bush was only 19 when she hit the charts in Australia and Britain in 1978
with her debut single, Wuthering Heights. Her run of hits in the 1980s includes
Babooshka, Running Up That Hill and Don't Give Up, a duet with Peter Gabriel.
Babooshka Kate Is Missing Again
The Sunday Telegraph (Sidney)
by Brendan Shanahan
August 14, 2005
There's a joke doing the rounds at the moment on Kate Bush newsgroups.
Q: How many Kate Bushes does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One, but it takes about 15 years and requires absolute silence.
If you're not a Kate Bush fan, this joke might not be very funny.
The point is that all around the world, people like me are sitting glued to the computers in the desperate hope that there will be some news, and news about her new album.
Despite it having been due for release in March, there's still no word on what must be the most awaited recording since Guns'n'Roses announced the phantom that was Chinese Democracy.
For months, I've been plagued by images of Kate in a crumbling Edwardian manor, her finger stuck in a faulty power socket, her body dead on the floor.
Has anyone gone around to check? In desperation, I contacted her record company.
"We'll let you know when we hear anything," they said. But what if I can't wait that long?
English writer John Mendelssohn wrote an entire novel called Waiting For Kate Bush about a cast of misfits in an apartment building driven insane by anticipation. It sounds terribly familiar.
Kate's last album, Red Shoes, was released in 1993. It was an uneven effort, but featured some stunning compensations (Moments Of Pleasure is one of her finest.)
In the interim, Bush's legend has undergone a revival of of sorts. First, The Futureheads had a hit with her Hounds Of Love, then bands in the states began naming her as an influence.
It seems a generation who were pre-pubescent when Bush was prancing about in the metal Babooshka bra are the new face of rock.
The reasons Kate Bush inspires such fanaticism are well noted. Her output is tiny and completely; she is utterly mysterious and rarely seen in public.
Without a human face, she becomes a blank screen on which people project their problems and fantasies.
For millions, Kate Bush has become the Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain. The reality is perhaps an inevitable disappointment.
Meanwhile, all we can do is wait.
The Australian
by Iain Snedden
November 5, 2005
(4 stars out of 5)
No one can sing the words 'washing machine' with such beautiful
intensity as Kate Bush; but then again, who would want to? 'Slooshy-sloshy,
slooshy-sloshy/get that dirty shirt clean' she goes on, all ethereal, mystical
and Kate Bushy on Mrs Bartolozzi. It's twelve years since we heard Bush
on CD and she still treads purposefully that fine line between genius and what
might be construed as .......well, a bit silly. Dull she is not, though, and
Aerial is brimful of the Bushiness that characterised her best albums,
The Kick Inside (1978)
and Hounds of Love (1985).
This much anticipated comeback is split into two CDs, A Sea of Honey and
A Sky of Honey. The former is a mixed bag, with the aforementioned Mrs
Bartolozzi and Bertie (a reference, one of several, to her seven year
old son) the flimsiest of the seven tracks. They are counterbalanced by the
inspired, ambient, funky and sexy King of the Mountain, with Bush's voice
at its most soulful and least flighty, and the most acutely poppy song, How
to Be Invisible. These contrast greatly with A Coral Room, an eerily
stark eulogy to her late mother. The second CD is more conceptual, a journey
from early morning (Prelude, Prologue) through to night (Nocturne),
accompanied by a selection of birds and on two occasions by the dulcet warble
and didgeridoo of Rolf Harris (no, really). Nocturne is the most
compelling track, a soaring, confident, hopeful 8 1/2 minutes ('we tire of
the city/we tire of it all/we long for just that somthing more') that segues
seamlessly into the more celebratory title-track finale. Bush can be heard
laughing towards the end, supposedly with the birds. Given her long absence, she
might also allow herself a chuckle at being able to transcend time and trends
with such remarkable ease.
The Age
by Michael Dwyer
November 11, 2005
(4 stars out of 5)
There's a bit halfway through disc one of this outrageously
long-awaited double album, in a song called Mrs Bartolozzi, that's destined to
polarise the curious listener and the Kate Bush obsessive.
The former is perhaps unaware that Aerial is her first release in 12 years. The
latter has counted with anguish every empty Christmas since The Red Shoes, and
knows precisely what has kept the Bexley doctor's daughter occupied during this
unprecedented absence.
To the delicate, staccato accompaniment of her piano, the bit goes like this: "Slooshy
sloshy slooshy sloshy/Get that dirty shirty clean/Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy/Make
those cuffs and collars gleam".
A new mother and oblivious pop legend, Kate Bush's chief occupations these past
dozen years have been blissfully domestic. Judging by the ingenious micro/cosmic
focus of this home-studio opus, her deliberate distance from pop fashion and
expectation has enhanced her gift for finding magic under her own fingernails.
Mrs Bartolozzi, for instance, is a sexually charged Cinderella fantasy loaded
with ghosts and longing and one of Bush's favourite metaphors, a fearful body of
water. Or maybe it's about an Italian washing lady enjoying a sneaky spliff.
Aerial is barmy, sumptuous, personal, playful, profound and unmistakably Kate.
It cares not a newt's whisker for cool - yes, that's THE Rolf Harris on An
Architect's Dream and The Painter's Link - and it refers any question of musical
progress to the old "ain't broken" rule.
Del Palmer's trademark slithering fretless bass and the late Michael Kamen's
lush orchestrations weave through the same pristine, three-dimensional cathedral
of sound that Bush pioneered in the 1980s. That's what happens if you blithely
ignore 12 years of alleged musical progress: you can pretend the post-grunge
backwash, the nu-rock cacophony, the Prodigy, Robbie Williams, generations of
recycled retro filler, a thousand sub-genres of dance music and the entire
chill-out muzak tragedy never happened. Mmmm, nice.
Not that Kate Bush has taken the tiniest leaf from anyone else's book since the
British art-rock of Pink Floyd, David Bowie and Roxy Music inspired her as a
mid-'70s teenager. In form and content she's always drawn purely on her
eccentric English imagination.
Her high-concept roots show in Aerial's twin-disc presentation, each with
subtitle: A Sea of Honey and A Sky of Honey. Given that both could have squeezed
onto one CD, we're clearly dealing with an Artistic Statement here, stubbornly
rooted in the age when such things came with Side One and Side Two, with the
enforced listener participation that used to entail.
A Sea of Honey comprises seven unconnected songs, beginning with the downbeat
single King of the Mountain. With its references to Elvis Presley, Citizen Kane
and "a multimillionaire (filling) up his home with priceless junk", it's an
unusually transparent song about the sad game of wealth and celebrity.
The alleged reclusive pop sorceress enjoys another joke about her reputation
with How To Be Invisible. It grooves like a spooky incantation, but the spell
lists household ingredients: "Hem of anorak/ Stem of wallflower/ Hair of doormat
. . . Jump into the mirror/ and you're invisible".
A slightly dodgy song about Joan of Arc continues her flirtation with literary
and/or historical figures, but it's mostly kitchen-table heroes that inspire
these songs. Her six-year-old son Bertie is celebrated in a medieval pastoral
feel, with the kind of open-hearted expression that will aggrieve cynics no end.
π is a highlight, both for its eccentricity
and unlikely lyricism. To the whimsical throb of bass and synthesisers, Bush
sings the titular mathematical conundrum digit by digit, to 120 decimal places.
Infinitely daft or unfathomably deep? Make your own calculation.
Where The Red Shoes erred on the side of over-production and unwelcome guests,
much of Aerial finds Bush returning to her elegant acoustic piano and vocal
arrangements. A Coral Room is a touching song about her late mother with a
refrain based on Little Brown Jug. Again, perhaps only Kate people understand.
That goes double for disc two, A Sky of Honey, which is your full-blown concept
album awash with birdsong and shifting colours as it follows the natural cycle
of light from late afternoon to night. Bertie and Rolf both crop up in the
orchestrated soundscape, and mummy sings an astonishing harmony duet with a
blackbird before bedtime. No, really. Think of it as a calmer, gracefully older
sequel to Side Two of Hounds of Love.
According to the logarithmic spread of previous releases, the ninth Kate Bush
album is due sometime in the 2050s. On this evidence, it will probably sound
like she's only popped off for a minute to do the laundry.
Gone Bush
The Adelaide Advertiser
by Mike Gribble
November 10, 2005
Back to dispel the esoteric recluse theory, Kate Bush has
extended herself beyond her highest accolades.
The inimitable character behind the wildly eccentric Wuthering Heights crafts a
beautifully tempered sea of ambient drama (Joanni ). At age 47, she has drawn
much of the inspiration for this album from her only child, son Bertie.
It was also he who prolonged the gestation period which spawned this double
album.
The coupling of her operatic voice with gentle piano (even Rolf Harris'
didgeridoo) delivers an uplifting air and her rich strike rate of infectious
harmonics is cast with stark imagery and lilting orchestral finery.
The simple frailty of Mrs Bartolozzi is masterful.
So it is that precision and minimalism outline the arrangements (Prologue ).
While last month's release of the first single, King of the Mountain, was a
surprise tempter, it is just a fraction of her greater musical equation. Sure,
she has challenged past listeners with a love it/leave it quandary but, here,
Bush presents more magnetic beauty in her return from music's periphery than
most artists muster in a life's work.
Domestic goddess of song
Sydney Morning Herald
by James Button
November 12, 2005
It starts with a high piano tinkling in the key of A - so far so normal. Then it shifts and shifts again, four quick key changes, sharp to flat, major to minor, sweet to downright strange. A classical pianist would have understood what the girl was doing to get such unsettling sound but no one wrote pop like that. And no one sang like that wailing falsetto, with its hint of the madwoman in the attic, its dash of Emily Dickinson and touch of Emily Bronte herself, who died of consumption in her early 20s and who was born on July 30, the same day as a teenager growing up in Kent in the 1970s called Catherine Bush - who heard this fact, was spooked and thrilled by it, and sat down one night under a full moon at midnight and wrote a song called Wuthering Heights.
Released in 1978, when Bush was 19, Wuthering Heights raced to the top of the British charts (knocking off Abba), the first time a woman had done so with a song she wrote herself. That year she put out two albums, drawing on hundreds of songs she had written since she was 12. She sang of incest and suicide, of Peter Pan and the ghost of a shot-down Spitfire pilot yearning to see London Bridge in the rain. As her London gay fan club later described her, she was "eccentric, elusive, and very, very English".
If her roots could be defined they were in folk, classical music, literature and the romantic tradition, never in the trends of the day. At the snarling, spitting height of punk, she wore a leotard and pranced about on videos trailing bits of pre-Raphaelite fabric behind her. She was an easy target for parody, because she was one of a kind.
She made five albums in seven years, culminating in her 1985 work Hounds of Love, perhaps her masterpiece, which former Sex Pistol John Lydon described as "beyond an album, an opera". Though she toured only once - she disliked live performance and is said to have a fear of flying - she attracted an army of adoring, sometimes obsessive, fans.
Then, in 1993, after two commercially unsuccessful albums and widening pauses between them, the music stopped. Bush vanished. She made no records, gave just one interview in 12 years. Despairing fans debated on websites whether it was all over. The tabloids, possibly irked by a celebrity who dared to deny them their daily feed, painted her as Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, a weirdo recluse shut up in her mansion on an island in the upper Thames. What was she up to? Rumours ran wild: Bush had finally succumbed to the pleas of record company executives, invited them to her house to witness her latest creation, and produced a batch of home-made cakes from the oven.
At last, in August, came an EMI press release: a new Kate Bush album was imminent. After 12 years, the revelation caused a stir. Newspapers dusted off headlines: Kate Expectations and Dithering Heights. Journalists were invited to EMI's London headquarters to get a sneak preview, with a security man watching over them. Bush even did an interview.
This week she released Aerial, a 16-track double album. As with everything she has done, it is diverse, unpredictable, wild. A conventional rock track precedes a cascade of flamenco guitar, which runs on from a strings arrangement. Her word imagery is characteristically vivid: "the spider of time is crawling over the ruins," she sings in A Coral Room, about the death of her mother, Hannah. She also sings to a pigeon and, as immune to fashion as ever, has a dialogue with Rolf Harris, who plays a street painter and blows the didgeridoo.
The album betrays Bush's preoccupations: there's a song about Elvis and Citizen Kane, another called How to be Invisible. Yet there's a better clue to the mystery in the narcotic ballad Mrs Bartolozzi.
A woman is watching clothes in a washing machine. Around and around they go, slosh slosh, and as she stares at them, she starts to imagine ...
"My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers ... oh the waves are coming in ... my shirt floating up around my waist ..."
Then she looks outside: "I think I see you standing outside, but it's just your shirt hanging on the washing line."
The dream broken, drudgery returns: "Slooshy, sloshy, slooshy, sloshy ... washing machine, washing machine, washing machine."
Bush broke her silence in an interview in Mojo this month. "For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living a normal life," she said. "It's so a part of who I am. It's so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don't know how dishwashers work. For me, that's frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being."
She was devastated by the death of her mother in the early 1990s. She slept a lot, couldn't work, watched a lot of bad television. She ended one long relationship - with the musician and sound engineer Del Palmer - and started another, with musician Danny McIntosh. In 1998, the couple had a child and managed to keep it quiet for 18 months, until Bush's friend, the musician Peter Gabriel, blurted it out on radio. She built a home studio so she could make her own music. She took complete control of her life.
Here's how Bush has explained her seclusion: "The more I got into presenting things to the world, the further it was taking me away from what I was, which was someone who just used to sit quietly at a piano and sing and play ... I am just trying to be a good, protective mother. I want to give Bertie as normal a childhood as possible while preserving his privacy." In an age of obsession with even the minutiae of celebrities' lives, being a recluse is the only way Bush can lead a normal life.
To Paul Rees, editor of British music magazine Q, it helps to explain her success. "She is a genuine enigma," he says. "Contrast her with Madonna. You can't possibly want to know any more about Madonna." He sees Bush's restraint as the key to her longevity. "What you know of her you know through her music."
Rees, who hadn't heard Aerial when he spoke to the Herald, sees it as a critical album for Bush: will it help her break through to a new, younger audience? BBC entertainment writer Darren Waters thought Aerial was "not for the iPod generation". Yet several contemporary bands cite her as an inspiration, from Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons to Placebo, who sang a cover of Running Up that Hill, to the Futureheads, whose 2001 version of Hounds of Love was a bigger hit than it was for Bush.
So far critics are divided about the album. Incomparable, impenetrable, pretentious and sublime: British reviewers have used all these words in the past two weeks. One found its heavy use of synthesisers dated, like a Sting album from 1985. Although Pete Paphides in The Times found much to admire on it, he also wondered whether it marked the point where "her lifelong artistic deceleration finally grinds to a halt". But to The Observer reviewer Kitty Empire, Aerial was genius and "arguably the most female album in the world, ever".
That may be the point. "Luvverly Bertie," Bush trills to her son, backed by Renaissance guitars. Its intensity is compelling, though as The Guardian reviewer Alexis Petridis pointed out, it's a song that will have Bertie slamming doors and yelling, "Mum, you're so embarrassing," when he gets to 15. For now, though, Bertie leads a magical life of sun, wind, paint, chirruping birds and English green. His mother's life is also in the music, not hidden. If Aerial tells the truth, at 47, Kate Bush has found her compass, her own way home.
The Courier Mail
by Noel Mengel
November 12, 2005
(4 stars out of 5)
You know how some days you just ache to cut
yourself off from the world, not to see the news
or hear about the next big thing?
You can put the headphones on and do that with
Bush's first album in 12 years, which has
nothing contemporary or topical about it. In
terms of sounds, it could have been recorded in
1985.
Bertie, a song of love for Bush's seven-year-old
son, goes back even further, since it is a
folk-based tune which might have been sung at
court centuries ago.
Domestic matters are high in Bush's thoughts,
although her erotic charge is still in evidence
in Mrs Bartolozzi, a song which at first might
seem to be about washing day but which most
certainly is not. 'Slooshy sloshy', Bush
enthuses, 'get that dirty shirty clean.'
Jeepers.
It's a vast piece of work across two CDs and 90
minutes, and no reviewer can pretend to get to
the bottom of it in just a few weeks. Some of it
is brilliant, some floats ethereally by on drum
machines and synthesisers which everyone else
sent to the tip years ago. The CD, A Sky of
Honey, floats easily through the course of a day
from morning until night, complete with birdsong
and didgeridoo from Rolf Harris.
But Bush is still her own woman, still walks the
line between the ordinary and the wondrous and
daft, undiluted by attempts to follow trends or
please corporate bosses.
Go on, treat yourself. Escape!
Bush is on
fire again
Melbourne Herald Sun
by Cameron Adams
November 10, 2005
(4.5 stars out of 5)
Few artists dare to leave 12 years between albums. Yet few artists are like Kate Bush.
In an industry filled with corporate pretenders, Bush is an original. And originals work at their own pace.
Since Bush's last album, 1993's The Red Shoes, Bush clone Tori Amos has released seven albums, which matches Bush's entire catalogue since her 1978 debut.
Moody single King Of The Mountain was a striking comeback: that instantly identifiable voice over a song that unfolds at its own pace.
There's a reason why Aerial is a double album - and not just because you'd imagine that after 12 years there's a backlog of songs.
Disc one house houses the more straightforward tunes; disc two is a concept piece filled with all manner of ideas and instrumentation.
Fans will be enthralled; you are channeled directly back into Kate's mysterious, sensual world.
The gorgeous Pi boasts that low voice Bush pulls out at just the right moment (she even sings numbers from the pi equation - it's musical porn for mathematicians) and the sprightly, string-soaked Bertie is an ode to her young son, her main distraction during the past few years.
The hypnotic How to Be Invisible is powerful. And even stripped back to just Kate and piano (in Prologue) she still sounds like nobody else and as vital as ever.
There's still plenty of weirdness - and not just Rolf Harris (cast as a painter) popping up on disc two among an array of bird noises.
Mrs Bartolozzi not only has the lyric "slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy get that dirty shirty clean", but Kate singing "washing machine" over and over. Beat that, Tori.
Ah, it's so good to have her back.
The verdict: **** 1/2
In a word: unique
Sydney Morning Herald
by
November 12, 2005
"The wind is whistling through the house." It was with some appropriateness that Kate Bush named her 1989 album The Sensual World. It is in the realm of the senses that Bush explores and always has: from the dark Yorkshire moors to the utterly primal pleasure in the response to your child's smell. It is in the realm of the senses that Bush is at her most compelling and, often, confounding.
That duality is the coin of this realm so if you enter it with this double album - split into slightly emotionally divergent discs called A Sea of Honey and A Sky of Honey - you must come knowing that you may not always "understand" intellectually but that you will always feel.
Take, for example, Mrs Bartolozzi, from the first disc, which on superficial reading could be dismissed as some ode to the char lady (the refrain is "washing machine/washing machine" and there is a bit of "slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy"). But feel it rather than think it and you begin to grasp issues of domestic bliss and loneliness; earthiness and innocence; Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden.
Similarly, on disc two - which is a song-cycle built from one day's first birdsong through to the morrow's dawn - there is Somewhere in Between. Built on a warm, ambient bed reminiscent of Talk Talk's Life's What You Make It, it could be cast aside by the hasty as both lyrically and musically slight. But that would be to miss the slowly settling warmth and pleasure, that sensation of coming to rest at the end of a day of action.
To skip over what Somewhere in Between does would be to miss the way it prepares the ground for one of this album's climactic and quite stunning emotional soundscapes, Nocturn and Aerial. Here are songs that open up to you like one of those time-lapse photography nature documentaries: gentle, promising, then flowering, bursting and finally radiant and erotic. It charges you with energy, with life.
The songs already mentioned are, in a sense, the tent markers, the perimeters, rather than the whole story of this album (I could spend twice as much time talking about the heart- and gut-wrenching A Coral Room alone).
There isn't a genuine pop song here, a Hounds of Love or even a Cloudbusting, and in isolation some tracks would feel lost. But then this is an album to be played for its cumulative effect rather than its single moments. An album to be felt. "The wind it blows the door closed."
Melbourne
Sunday Herald
by Graeme Hammond
November 13, 2005
(5 stars out of 5)
In short: Beautiful,
eccentric work of piano, voice and birdsong.
"How to be Invisible" is a song title that well
defines the past decade of Kate Bush's life:
after 1993's odd album "The Red Shoes", the
waifish singer retreated to quiet family life,
toiling sporadically on an album even she
sometimes doubted she would complete.
Thankfully, she persisted. "Aerial", a double
album of two distinct halves, is probably her
best ever, a confident, adventurous, delicate
and enchanting work that displays a fascination
with life, love, nature and the tedium of
domesticity.
"King of the Mountain", written in 1996 as a
musing about Elvis, is the most conventional
pop, reminiscent of "Running Up That Hill". "Pi"
tells of a man obsessed with numbers, while
"Mrs. Bartolozzi" is a sexually-tinged reverie
of a woman watching the washing going round. Er,
right.
Disc two is the deeper half, a lush song suite
of piano, strings and birdsong, charting the
progress of day from one dawn to the next.
Heathcliff, she's back.
What Kate Did Next
Melbourne Age
by James Button
November 19, 2005
Kate Bush was
rock's great enigma for more than a decade but
she returns with an eccentric album mixing
domestic passions and mystique, writes James
Button.
It starts with a high piano tinkling in A - so
far, so normal. Then it shifts and shifts again,
four key changes in two bars, sharp to flat,
major to minor, sweet to downright strange. A
classical pianist would have understood what the
girl was doing to get such unsettling sound, but
no one wrote pop like that.
And no one sang like that: a wailing falsetto
with a hint of the madwoman in the attic, a dash
of Emily Dickinson and a touch of Emily Bronte
who died of consumption in her early 20s and who
was born on July 30, the same day as a teenager
growing up in Kent in the 1970s called Catherine
Bush - who heard this fact, was spooked and
thrilled by it, and sat down one night under a
full moon at midnight and wrote a song called
Wuthering Heights.
Released in 1978, when Bush was 19, Wuthering
Heights raced to the top of the British charts
(knocking off Abba), the first time a woman had
done so with a song she wrote herself. That year
she put out two albums, drawing on hundreds of
songs she had written since she was 12. She sang
of incest and suicide, of Peter Pan and the
ghost of a shot-down Spitfire pilot yearning to
see London Bridge in the rain. As her London gay
fan club later described her, she was
"eccentric, elusive, and very, very English".
If her roots could be defined they were in folk,
classical music, literature and the Romantic
tradition, never in the trends of the day. At
the snarling, spitting height of punk she wore a
leotard and pranced about on videos trailing
bits of pre-Raphaelite fabric behind her. She
was an easy target for parody, because she was
one of a kind.
She made five albums in seven years, culminating
in her 1985 work Hounds of Love, perhaps her
masterpiece, which former Sex Pistol John Lydon
described as "beyond an album, an opera". Though
she only toured once - she disliked live
performance and is said to have a fear of flying
- she attracted an army of adoring, sometimes
obsessive, fans. Then, in 1993, after two
commercially unsuccessful albums and widening
pauses between them, the music stopped.
Bush vanished. She made no records, gave just
one interview in 12 years. Despairing fans
debated on websites whether it was all over. The
tabloids, possibly irked by a celebrity who
dared to deny them their daily feed, painted her
as Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, a weirdo
recluse shut up in her mansion on an island in
the upper Thames. What was she up to? Rumours
ran wild: Bush had finally succumbed to the
pleas of record company executives, invited them
to her house to witness her latest creation, and
produced a batch of home-made cakes from the
oven.
At last, in August, came an EMI press release: a
Kate Bush album was imminent. After 12 years,
the news caused a stir. Newspapers dusted off
headlines: Kate Expectations and Dithering
Heights. Journalists were invited to EMI's
London headquarters to get a sneak preview, with
a security man watching over them. Bush even did
an interview.
This week she released Aerial, a 16-track double
album. As with everything she has done, it is
diverse, unpredictable, wild. A conventional
rock track precedes a cascade of flamenco
guitar, which runs on from a strings
arrangement. Her word imagery is
characteristically vivid: "the spider of time is
crawling over the ruins," she sings in A Coral
Room, about the death of her mother, Hannah. She
also sings to a pigeon and, as immune to fashion
as ever, has a dialogue with Rolf Harris, who
plays a street painter and blows the didgeridoo.
The album betrays Bush's preoccupations: there's
a song about Elvis and Citizen Kane, another
called How to be Invisible. Yet there's a better
clue to the mystery, in the narcotic ballad, Mrs
Bartolozzi.
A woman is watching clothes in a washing
machine. Around and around they go, slosh slosh,
and as she stares at them, she starts to imagine
...
"My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers
... oh the waves are coming in ... my shirt
floating up around my waist ..."
Then she looks outside: "I think I see you
standing outside, but it's just your shirt
hanging on the washing line."
The dream broken, drudgery returns: "Slooshy,
sloshy, slooshy, sloshy ... washing machine,
washing machine, washing machine."
In an interview published in Mojo last week Bush
broke her silence. "For the last 12 years, I've
felt really privileged to be living a normal
life," she said. "It's so a part of who I am.
It's so important to me to do the washing, do
the hoovering. Friends of mine in the business
don't know how dishwashers work. For me, that's
frightening. I want to be in a position where I
can function as a human being."
She was devastated by the death of her mother in
the early 1990s. She slept a lot, couldn't work,
watched a lot of bad television. She ended one
long relationship - with the musician and sound
engineer Del Palmer - and started another, with
musician Danny McIntosh. In 1998, the couple had
a child and managed to keep it quiet for 18
months, until Bush's friend, the musician Peter
Gabriel, blurted it out on radio. She built a
home studio so she could make her own music. She
took complete control of her life.
Here's how Bush has explained her seclusion:
"The more I got into presenting things to the
world, the further it was taking me away from
what I was, which was someone who just used to
sit quietly at a piano and sing and play ... I
am just trying to be a good, protective mother.
I want to give Bertie as normal a childhood as
possible while preserving his privacy." In an
age of obsession with even the minutiae of
celebrities' lives, being a recluse is the only
way Bush can be normal.
To Paul Rees, editor of British music magazine
Q, it helps to explain her success. "She is a
genuine enigma," he says. "Contrast her with
Madonna. You can't possibly want to know any
more about Madonna." He sees Bush's restraint as
the key to her longevity. "What you know of her
you know through her music."
Rees, who hadn't heard Aerial when he spoke to
The Age, sees it as a critical album for Bush:
will it help her break through to a new, younger
audience? BBC entertainment writer Darren Waters
thought Aerial was "not for the iPod
generation".
So far critics are divided about the album.
Incomparable, impenetrable, pretentious and
sublime: British reviewers have used all these
words in the past two weeks. But to Observer
reviewer Kitty Empire Aerial was genius and
"arguably the most female album in the world,
ever".
That may be the point. "Luvverly Bertie," Bush
trills to her son, backed by Renaissance
guitars. Its intensity is compelling, though as
Guardian reviewer Alexis Petridis pointed out,
it's a song that will have Bertie slamming doors
and yelling "Mum you're so embarrassing" when he
gets to 15. For now, though, Bertie leads a
magical life of sun, wind, paint, chirruping
birds and English green. His mother's life is
also in the music. If Aerial tells the truth, at
47 Kate Bush has found her compass, her own way
home.
The Drum Media
by Ross Clelland
November 22, 2005
It's easy to
trot out the typical words 'enigmatic',
'unique'. But with Kate Bush, they almost
understate her status. Not many artists would
take a decade between albums and still have it
welcomed with such anticipation.
And what she delivers after this hiatus of life
changes- the birth of her son and death of her
mother obviously pivotal events- is a Kate Bush
album; nothing more or less. Musical beds are
largely built on layers of synths that some
younger pretenders might consider a little
old-fashioned. Her voice is still that thing of
wonder which can soar, though maybe not as
hysterically as the precocious 19 year old who
offered that psycho-analytic dissection (with
eccentric dancing) of Wuthering Heights. It's
leavened now with a conversational lower
register, with a couple of decades more life
colouring it. It can still move you: in a nice
twist on singing the phone book, in the midst of
Pi's musing on a mathematician's obsession, she
starts reciting the decimal places of the
equation, and somehow imbues the numbers with
real longing and emotion.
As that suggests, her worldview and lyrical
concerns cover everything from cerebral to
historical, from mundane to eccentric. Joanni
has Joan Of Arc's sparkling armour inspiring
rockstar-like devotion. Meantime, Mrs Bartolozzi
imagines love scenes in her washing machine's
spin cycle.
The Sky of Honey second disc centres on a theme
of a twilight to dawn, probably see from her own
window. Birds fly home and outward, a painter
(as voiced by Rolf Harris no less...) sees his
day's work marred by rain, but then finds
something new in the streaks.
But overall Bush's priorities have changed, And
while some mothers will write nursery rhymes of
love to their sons, Bertie now has his mother's
affection in song, but it's more medieval
madrigal than Hi-5. Aerial is a portrait of a
woman- a woman continuing to confound and
delight us.
"The pull and the push of it all..." - Kate Bush
Reaching Out
is a
Marvick - Hill
Willker -
Mapes
Fitzgerald-Morris
Grepel - Love-Hounds
Presentation
