NP: Kate Bush Hounds of Love
I have a long history with Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (1986), reaching back to high school afternoons spent with a one of my dearest and longest lasting friends. His introduction to Bush happened without me, and my introduction came through him, as I did pesky physics homework on the floor of his living room while he tumbled through “Mother Stands for Comfort” on his piano. We’d talked about whether or not “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” was about David Gilmour or about masturbation, but we never resolved it.
All the records I really love take turns at the center of my listening cycle. I tend to have one or two durable favorites in rotation at all times, as I spend time with newer things peripherally. In the elite “almost always being played at least once a week” category are records like Tusk, All Things Must Pass, Red Apple Falls and Dire Straits. There are quite a few records that come around less frequently than that, but more frequently than others things, of course. A couple weeks ago I listened to almost nothing but Camofleur for a week straight. If things are good, something brand new takes stage center, knocking an old favorite back to the archives. I believe the most recent record to do that for me was Rook, and before that, Shining’s Grindstone. Recently, I’ve found it hard to listen to almost anything but Hounds.
Coming three years after Dreaming - a creative pinnacle and throbbing ode to the avant, particularly in terms of Bush’s then ear-splitting soprano - Hounds achieved what then must have seemed impossible to both critics and fans. Bush spent a meticulous three years in production, doing all the work herself (mostly in her home studio) and managed to retain her eclectic appeal while providing the pop consumers (and the Americans) something to bite on. The production includes samples, choral arrangements, her signature Fairlight CMI, surprising harmony and innovative mixing. It was also her most commercially successful album, and knocked Madonna’s Like a Virgin out of the top spot on the UK charts.
One of the particularly interesting things to note about Hounds is that Bush took great pains to distinguish between her more literary, esoteric style and her desire to demonstrate her pop credibility. Side one, the “Hounds of Love” side, features all the radio-ready tunes, including “Running Up That Hill” and “The Big Sky.” The later is said to be written in response to critiques of Dreaming that pinned it as “too obtuse” for common consumption. All of side one is gorgeous, and it introduced me to a Bush that was experiencing a vocal transition (perhaps with age? a lot of Dreaming’s tunes were written when she was still a teen) into a lower pitch, but not sacrificing the range that she was capable of mastering. It’s also the introduction to theme: side one is Sky,side two is Water.
And side two (”The Ninth Wave,” a title stolen from Tennyson) is where things really get good. The innocent stargazing girl disappears, and we meet the young girl that is stranded in water, facing certain drowning, slipping in and out of consciousness. She meets witches, angels and ghosts, and goes through nothing short of a philosophical revolution as she falls from the sky to the cold depths of the water. “Jig of Life” is my personal favorite on this side; the contrast between happy Irish jig against a deep and dark poem recital (courtesy her older brother) indicating a certain doom handed over from the gods of the underworld. Next, the penultimate track, “Hello Earth” actually walks us through the transition Bush’s character surrogate (and herself, conceivably) has traveled between side one and side two. The ominous choral arrangement in the song was arranged by Michael Berkeley, who was given instructions to collage something harmonically surprising with inspiration from the orthodox singing/chanting in Herzog’s Nosferatu. That piece, which they couldn’t identify at the time, was called “Zinskaro,” a traditional Georgian song. Beginning with what seems to be a dream about driving with a loved one, she’s quickly hearing the voices from under the water, reminding her of her now certain fate. Even as she looks to the sky, she’s being pulled under.
Go to sleep, little earth / I was there at the birth / Out of the cloudburst / The head of the tempest … Why did I go?
And as the drowning woman realizes her fate, the songwriter retraces her steps from the cloudbusting side one, full of pop and joy, falls out of the cloudburst and says goodnight to little Earth. In some ways, her shockingly calm goodbye seems almost like a relief, and perhaps that is indicative of something — especially if parts of this record are an attempt to wrestle with her conflicts between a pop life and a more introverted songwriter’s. That bridge between elevated lightning rider in the public eye and submerged artist is a long and wobbly one, and she was certainly dealing with these struggles at this time. Even the light of day has a lingering fog, as the album’s closing track says goodbye to her personal life: mother, father, siblings. Again, she seems content here, and this closing track is delicate and precious, even sweet. “Do you know what? I love you better now.” Almost as if the realization of her place in the shadows, underground, is what’s best for her.
“Being born again, into the sea” can be read as a middle finger to pop culture, but she’s never really thumbed her nose at us too glaringly. Over the years she’s taken long hiatuses and poured incredible amounts of time and energy into her work. In that way, she’s stayed clear of the pop machine — shouldering blistering speculation and rumors from fans and critics, always emerging again as brilliant and beautiful as before, with a new and interesting subject for our digestion. But she’s always been a sort of dark horse as well … thumbing her nose at the typical role women singer songwriters take up.
3 Comments