3/4 and ‘Disc of the Week’ from Robert Everett-Green in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

“mundane personal experience has never been a big subject for Bush, who prefers situations where her imagination can run without stumbling over too much imposed reality. And why not? Shakespeare had no first-hand knowledge of Venice, Kafka never travelled to America and Jules Verne did not visit the moon. Someone else in her shoes might have made the snow and ice a backdrop for romantic scenarios … Bush prefers to engage with the stuff itself … Bush isn’t playing for laughs. She’s going for the big dead-of-night realization, that comes when the world’s asleep and everything that’s lost can return in imagination, close but unreachable … Bush’s music emulates a jazz piano trio at 3 a.m., without the jazz. It’s reflective and spacious … a few recurring cadences on her piano might have been imported from Arvo Part’s austere religious music. Most of the album has a hushed, night-world feeling to it … But her characteristic soprano yowl is hardly evident on this disc. To really like 50 Words for Snow, you’ve got to be keen on records that just simmer along, and that build a case through time and repetition. I find Bush’s repeated piano tunelets weak fuel for a song of eight or nine minutes, but I respect what she does otherwise, the guts and the focus and – sometimes – the lean beauty of it.”