Category: Reviews Page 3 of 10

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.”

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”

In my humble opinion one of the best reviews yet from Simon Moore at Live4Ever:

“She’s a storyteller. She was always a storyteller … these songs … are incredible, genre-defying songs, but Bush has never been one for resting on her laurels, so a new sound is necessary … Those little piano flourishes are jazzier, more sustained. That eloquent, silky voice has lost the fanciful swoops and dives of yesteryear; it comes to the front of the mix and gains a whole new poise and vitality … stripping the music down to its core elements … If this is startting to sound overly poetic, then you at least have some idea of what this music does to you. This mellow soundtrack to dark country evenings doesn’t grab you, it creeps and tip-toes up inside your ear and works on you, letting each song grow on you until you can’t help but lose yourself in the whole album … With every listen, this album will reveal another layer, another part of the story you’d never heard before. There’s a lifetime’s worth of listening here. Best get started.”

Tjames Madison at Soundspike is a lover of Kate’s voice:

“Bush remains a singular talent draped in the furs of surreality … It feels like she’s talking about herself by not talking about herself, and why not? The spiky peaks and higher peaks of her youthful chops have been replaced with a sort of smoky mid-range purr, all the better — devoid of much of that voice’s avant garde divisiveness — to examine her role in our modern world as mentor to a bumper crop of spiritual progeny … The instrumentation — Bush accompanying herself with stark, lovely, slightly jazzy piano; the occasional muffled guitar or brushed cymbal or sublimated string section drops in — is gorgeous, and the first half of the wintry song-cycle arrives exactly like its subject, a light, enchanted icefall in near-silence, everyday magic unfolding before your eyes. The tunes wander long and walk softly in this world … But all is not perfect. Elton John’s sudden appearance on “Snowed in on Wheeler Street” feels like an unwelcome intrusion … Fortunately the demure “Among Angels” ends the set back where we started, lost in that haunted, white-dusted graveyard, Bush alone once again with her voice and her piano…”

Album of the week from Tom at Stereogum, a new convert and not the first we’ve heard of since Kate’s new work has been released:

“To this point, I’ve lived a full and happy life without ever much considering the works of Ms. Kate Bush. I knew the singles, sure, and I had a general understanding of her influence on later art-pop spell-weavers … But the singles, with their twisty helium squeals and their non-Euclidean melodies, never convinced me to dig much further. For the most part, Bush has been, for me, one of those canonical blind spots that everyone has. But her new 50 Words For Snow is the sort of album that convinces skeptics like me to go back and reconsider. At first glance, 50 Words For Snow comes waving plenty of red flags of pretentiousness. There’s the butt-ugly cover art. There are the virtually-nonexistent song-structures and the sprawling running times; not a single track dips under six minutes, and most go way longer. There are the loony concepts …  But when you actually give into the album’s seductive calm, all these weaknesses (except maybe the cover art) become strengths. Musically, 50 Words For Snow is a spare and delicate album, one that can unfold hazily in the background without demanding your full attention. Instrumentally, it’s arranged to flutter and waft, with its brushstroke drums and its impressionistic splashes of piano and its unobtrusive electronic ripples. Bush’s formidable voice remains in whisper-coo range most of the time, and her simple phrasings are enough to get under your skin. And with her lyrics so deliberately paced-out, it’s easy to forget how specific and absurd those story-songs can be … And once the album sinks in, which it will, even the most far-out ideas start to raise goosebumps. … the theme of ephemeral love slipping away is even more prevalent …  Once you let the album in, it’s powerful stuff.“

Rich Juzwial reviews the new album for The Daily, an iPad newspaper here. “Not since 1982’s “The Dreaming” has Bush been as gloriously goofy as she is on her 10th album, “50 Words for Snow.” On it, she courts a snowflake, covers the tracks of a yeti to keep him safe from scientists and builds a snowman with whom she has an affair. Her duet with Elton John, “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” plays out much like the hilariously clueless audition duet of “Midnight at the Oasis” in “Waiting for Guffman” (“Just two old flames keeping the fire going/ We look so good together,” growls John.) Even loopier is her collaboration with Stephen Fry on the album’s title track, which finds him listing off increasingly unlikely synonyms for snow (“swans-a-melting,” “faloop’njoompoola,” “creaky-creaky,” “Zhivagodamarbletash,” “bad for trains,” “blown from polar fur”) with Bush interrupting intermittently (“Come on man, you got 44 to go!”). If Bush isn’t having a laugh here, she’s at least plowing the way for everyone else.

Unfortunately, “50 Words for Snow” is more fun to think about than it is to listen to. While Bush retains her interest in brushed drums and upright bass that was apparent on “Aerial,” completely new to her aesthetic is an abandonment of pop structure, which is a shame. These seven tracks come in at 65 minutes, and one of them, “Misty,” runs 13 maddeningly chorus-less minutes. Bush’s piano playing is more a drizzle than a flurry: Repetitive themes just trickle out, leaving plenty of space between. The album crystallizes in the middle, finding a more upbeat structure (“Wildman” even has a hook!), but this is Bush at her most musically obtuse.