Joe Kennedy in The Quietus fully engages with the ambience:

 “50 Words for Snow sees Bush devote herself entirely to the impressionistic evocation of winter scenes. It’s perhaps surprising that she hasn’t been moved to embark on such a project earlier … Bush’s habitual provocations to abandon day-to-day concerns while cultivating romantic, internal landscapes have always felt slightly like the work of someone gazing from a window into a blizzard. This, one senses, is her natural territory … Where her past work has often been heavily-layered and breathless, 50 Words for Snow uses negative space to impressive effect; much of the album features little more than voice and flurrying passages of piano which gust across the stave, changing pace and melodic direction as if they’re suddenly hitting updrafts … played and arranged so exquisitely that even the most po-faced should be able to acknowledge the scale of its achievement. One struggles to think of a record which calls to mind a particular climate as powerfully as this does…“