Mike Ragogna’s interview with Kate, transcripts of which has turned up on a number of blogs, was transmitted today on Community Radio Station KRUU Fairfield and can be heard here (Thanks Louise).
Category: 50 Words for Snow Page 4 of 12
Barney Hoskyns, the co-founder and editorial director of Rock’s Backpages:
“As a staunch and loyal fan of Dame Katherine, I have to confess to some surprise at the plethora of 5-star reviews elicited by 50 TYPES OF SNOW. I’ve spent a week with the album and cannot discern what is so great about it. Even if you don’t miss the wild pop genius of the ’80s and love the mature piano melancholia of middle-aged Bush, she did the latter a lot better on AERIAL … Only on “Wild Man” does she pull off the kind of haunting pop classic we remember …. Or am I missing something?“
B- from Eli Kleman at Muzik Discovery:
“an album that sees the British pop royalty at the top of her game, years and years into her career. What is more impressive, however, is not that Bush has managed to remain relevant in a scene that isn’t exactly conducive to late career releases, but it is that the artist has once again challenged the definition of what a pop album can and should be. 50 Words For Snow is unlike a lot of the drivel the genre pumps out, in that is a beautiful, haunting, and introspective release that shows that although artists may age, their craft can remain just as incredible. 50 Words For Snow is a notable release for sure; a collection of seven mysterious entities that have received utmost care from Bush. They ebb and flow with a serene beauty, and move like the entrancing falling snow. Never once does the album ever get worked up … Although much of it is truly exemplary, 50 Words for Snow never actually goes anywhere. Yes, the luscious chords and inherently gorgeous singing goes a long way in making a great experience, but it all feels somewhat flat … It’s a beefy work for sure, which typically wouldn’t give cause for criticism, but it just stays at one level and never goes any further. Bush does an absolutely stunning job at creating a wonderful atmosphere, but it really is hampered by the painfully dull pace. Aside from that admittedly egregious stumble, Kate Bush still manages to craft one heck of an immersive album…”
3/4 from Rob Thomas at 77 Square:
“Largely minimizing the lush orchestrations she’s known for, Bush has delivered a spare, gorgeous album … Could any other songwriter get away with this other than Bush? Somehow, she takes potentially pretentious, even preposterous premises and makes them deeply felt through the elegant arrangements, evocative lyrics and, above all, the quavering conviction of that powerful voice. The result is the perfect soundtrack for a winter’s night, not so much as a brace against the cold, but an embrace.”
Five “N”s from Kevin Ritchie at Now Toronto:
“a solitary tone pervades these seven shivery compositions, many of which unfurl slowly and deliberately from Bush’s trembling piano. There’s a grace and simplicity to the arrangements. Jazzy syncopations give way to almost a cappella interludes, twittering guitar riffs and choral harmonies. The production has a lighter touch than her previous two efforts, but is no less considered … Best are Bush’s vocals, distinctly lower now but as brilliant and playful as ever. She grumbles, coos, burrs and wails, drawing out syllables with such devastating intensity …”
Another five stars from James Brightman at The Silver Tongue:
“the album is a microcosm that draws you in with a delicate embrace, belying the arctic theme with a warmth that you wouldn’t find in many other places, such is the beauty of Kate’s voice (possibly at its best after a 30+ year career) … When the album ended, I half-expected to be left with a brown sludge swimming around my shoes. I was sad to see the world go. 50 Words for Snow is a masterpiece. Its THE album that defines THE artist.“
Thom Jurek at Allmusic gives 50 Words For Snow a 4-star review:
“Despite the length of the songs, and perhaps because of them, it is easily the most spacious, sparsely recorded offering in her catalog. Its most prominent sounds are Bush’s voice, her acoustic piano, and Steve Gadd’s gorgeous drumming — though other instruments appear (as do some minimal classical orchestrations). With songs centered on winter, 50 Words For Snow engages the natural world and myth — both Eastern and Western — and fantasy. It is abstract, without being the least bit difficult to embrace….such a strange pop record, it’s all but impossible to find peers. While it shares sheer ambition with Scott Walkers’s The Drift and PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, it sounds like neither; Bush’s album is equally startling because its will toward the mysterious and elliptical is balanced by its beguiling accessibility.”
The BBC official chart update page and the NME report that Kate is currently at no.5 in the “midweek” UK Album Chart.
Immediately above Kate in the chart are the Michael Buble Christmas album, and three new entries all from acts that have been performing on major TV shows in the UK in the last week. According to music industry data 50 Words is selling stronger than Director’s Cut in its first week of release, but that album was released at a less competitive time of year when there were fewer new releases. The final UK album chart will be published on Sunday afternoon.
From SVT in Sweden (with thanks to Henrik). We hope this is a good review, but unfortunately our Swedish isn’t up to much! 🙂
Update: Swedish fans tell us that the reviewers in the clip say the album is Kate’s strongest and best yet and they love it. They also say that Kate is like the “ever changing snow”. Thanks guys.
Fascinating review of 50 Words from Daphne Carr at CapitalNewYork:
“The first phrases of the opener, “Snowflake,” sound so out of touch with contemporary music as to make the past 20 years seem to disappear altogether … The sensation only continues as the bass kicks in: Taut and thin and electric, a sound unheard in pop for ages. The guitars frizzle as if Fripp were still in demand. Add Steve Gadd’s toms, brushed snares, and the amorous synth pads and the record’s most contemporary influence would still be something like Talk Talk at their least pop. Bush’s late ’70s and early ’80s chart-dominating hits … similarly fade from memory, leaving only their affect, handfuls of chords, and those velvety vocal edges of hers. As the seven songs on this snow-themed album unfold, all that anachronism is what becomes its relevance. Kate Bush in 2011 might sound out of place, but at the same time it is impossible to listen to Kate Bush in 2011 without hearing and comparing her to all the many who have followed her lead. Perhaps the sparseness of this winter walk is her best way to get out of a very crowded house … With Bush, each instrument and each word or phrase serves the whole song precisely. It’s the definition of craft: not a sound is wasted; of course, that perfectionism also yielded the gap in her recording between 1993 and 2005 … On this album, Kate Bush goes through all the other Kate Bushes to get back to “Kate Bush.” … a parallel tradition of art into pop, one discounted at first as “quirky” or “oddball” but now able to be seen as masters at drawing from prog’s fusion impulse and new wave’s queerness, irreverence, and passion for the innovation in a pop package. Rob Young’s fantastic book Electric Eden charts the old and new of British folk as “the secret garden of British culture.” Young names Bush not as a new-waver but as one in the long lineage of Anglo musicians whose occult-tinged voices sing of nature and sky in odd time signatures with non-rock instruments, their bumper stickers reading “Keep England Weird.”
Little capsule review from Dylan Terra at Heavy Music:
“The mystical legend of Kate Bush is alive and well … 50 Words For Snow was certainly not rushed in its construction; and while playing, gives off the vibe that it’s in no rush to finish either … master of surreal dreamworlds and real emotion … And like a good storybook, it invites and transfixes with no prior experience needed.”
3.5 stars from Rebecca J Mazur in The Harvard Crimson:
“a uniquely remarkable album, with style, content, and structure at once fascinating and beautiful, yet strange and somewhat inaccessible … comprised almost entirely of abnormally long songs … best be described as minimalist sagas … a larger canvas for artistic expression and experimentation, it also makes it easy to lose track of the song itself, as many of the melodic motifs are repeated for many minutes without much variation … The album requires more focus to fully discern all there is to appreciate in the subtle instrumentation, calmly passionate vocals, and poetic content of the songs. Bush uses the expanded form of her songs to craft products with a tremendous deal of lyrical depth … All are triumphant examples of Bush’s usual creativity in crafting lyrics with wonderful imagery from unique sources of inspiration … Throughout the album there is also an understated sense of humor … Her voice soars at dramatic moments into her upper range in a disconcerting yet powerful dissonance, and then grows low and gravelly with urgency and desperation … a strange album. Its instrumentation is minimalistic, the melodies hard to grasp, and the lyrics often meandering and soulful. But it is also a brilliant compilation that showcases some of Bush’s best creative tendencies. The songs are as much works of art and poetry as they are music, and as such they require patience—patience that absolutely pays off.”
Short interview and album review by Jim Fusilli in the Wall Street Journal:
“When you consider that Kate Bush has gone as long as a dozen years between albums, the appearance of “Director’s Cut” earlier this year and “50 Words for Snow” (Anti) this week is a bonanza. Both discs remind us that Ms. Bush is rarely less than very interesting and often quite superb …”
Short interview with Mike Ragona in the online Huffington Post
Excerpt:
MR: Nice. Could you go into some background on “Misty”?
KB: The thing about that song, aside from having sort of unusual subject matter, is that it’s a very long song–it’s the longest song on the album. I think it runs about 14 minutes. It wasn’t even that I set out to write a song that long, but I was trying to explore the idea of working with longer song structures and moving away from the more traditional form. I wanted to be able to tell the story through a much longer piece of time and so I was able to go through various elements of the story and, hopefully, make the song build. The subject matter is sort of just about a girl who builds a snowman, and later the snowman comes to visit her in her bedroom.
MR: As snowmen often do.
KB: Well, I don’t know about that unless people just keep quiet about it. (laughs)
Nate Chinen reviews the new album for the New York Times here. ““The world is so loud,” murmurs Kate Bush in the first of many disarming choruses on “50 Words for Snow,” her unhurried, utterly self-contained, exquisitely strange new album….if (Director’s Cut) was the effort needed to jostle her into the right frame of mind for “50 Words,” it was worth it. The new album rightly glistens, its sonic parameters set by Ms. Bush’s supple pianism, its lyrics firmly girded by her imagination….the mood is slow and somber but not lugubrious — even when, as on a glacial ghost story like “Lake Tahoe,” there’s real pathos in play”
