Five star very happy review from Alexis Petrides at The Guardian:
“There are many peculiar things about Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow. If it’s not strictly speaking a Christmas album, it’s certainly a seasonal one, and the seasonal album is these days more associated with Justin Bieber than critically acclaimed singer-songwriters following their own wildly idiosyncratic path. It devotes nearly 14 impossibly beautiful minutes to Misty, a song on which Bush imagines first building a snowman and then, well, humping him, with predictably unhappy consequences … For all the subtle beauty of the orchestrations, there’s an organic, live feel, the sense of musicians huddled together in a room, not something that’s happened on a Bush album before. That aside, 50 Words for Snow is extraordinary business as usual for Bush, meaning it’s packed with the kind of ideas you can’t imagine anyone else in rock having. Taking notions that look entirely daft on paper and rendering them into astonishing music is very much Bush’s signature move. There’s something utterly inscrutable and unknowable about how she does it that has nothing to do with her famous aversion to publicity.“
ARoseGrowingOld
Alexis Petridis, I think I love you
Neil Mayor
Lake Tahoe scares the bejesus out of me now.Really creepy story ,,,,drowned woman rising out the lake searching for her dog and wandering the bleak frozen landscape to her house with unseeing eyes.What a vdeo that would make.The perfect Christmas ghost story! Kate does love her ghosts…….wuthering heights,watching me without you,and now Lake Tahoe.
Harry Horton
With Aerial and 50 Words for Snow, a significant perspective is whether we’re seeing a sharp dividing line occuring with two Kate Bushs appearing. 50 words for snow relates a mellower laid back fascinatingly jazz preominating Kate Bush as a central musical style to these recent songs. This jazz style was hardly apparent before 1993. Fortunately, the 7 albums precedent to 1993 are a massive treasure chest of wonderful pieces and if kate Bush never wrote another song, her creative heritage is well established with the earlier first seven albums. In alcoholics anonymous meetings one central fact that is stresed: the disease progresses while you’re sober. Going years without a drink does not mean the disease process is not active at work and could turn up in later years with a whole new physiological landscape if one slipped and went back to drinking. The years that kate Bush produced no music, that is, 1993-2011 ( save for Aerial), reflects that her dormant creativity evidently was progressing along in the silence throughout those years and now has emerged with a newinner landscape of creative essence, that is a jazz embodied style that was absent from the first part of her career. In anycase it will be interesting to see if she continues with the jazz style for future albums. And thus, when is the next album coming out?