Even for an artist whose music has taken more than its fair share of odd twists over the years, Kate Bush's new album has to rank right up there as being among her strangest. It is also one of her most beautiful, and one that was well worth the wait.
50 Words For Snow, her first album of all new material since 2005's Aerial, takes a couple of spins for it all to really start to sink in. On an initial listen, the seven songs on this album have the same sort of quietly pleasant, but meandering, innocuous quality you might find on any random piano solo album released on New Age labels like Windham Hill in the seventies.
Sure, they might go down fine with a nice glass of wine next to a warm fireplace. But if you can name that tune in three notes or less the next day, you've more than earned that trip to the sudden death round.
Yet, once you get past this simple deception, these are songs — mostly performed solo by Kate Bush on piano and vocals, with minimal accompaniment in a light jazz trio sort of format with bass and drums — that really begin to creep up on you and get under your skin.
Then, they start to haunt you.
The unifying theme of (what else?) snow is equally deceptive. Kate Bush's "Winter Wonderland" is not the same one you'll find on some Hallmark holiday greeting card, but rather one littered with ghosts stranded in a purgatory of romantic longing, and almost impossible loneliness and regret.
Ever since she was first discovered as a teenage prodigy by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour back in the seventies, Kate Bush's music has always had a strangely ethereal quality to it. At it's best though — particularly as heard on early songs like "Wow" and "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" — Kate Bush's unearthly soprano voice can also be both wondrously innocent and wildly erotic at the same time (of course, it doesn't hurt that Kate is also pretty hot).
It's no mistake that Kate Bush has been oft-cited as a key influence by everyone from Tori Amos to Florence And The Machine.
Article comments
1 - Alex
I do like Kate Bush and some songs that she has done over the years and like some tracks from her recent 2011 album. I must add that I have heard another musical artist who sounds like her being Emilie Simon and I have become more interested in her music being an inspiration and love what Emilie Simon does musically.