#(the only other one I’ve been to was Cloudbusting which is a Kate Bush cover band) have both been so fun!! we be grooven to the music

[blue-eli]

Ink October day twenty-six: Share

To accord a share in (something) to another or others.

To divide and parcel out in shares; apportion.

[passionate-reply]

This week on Great Albums: a Great Album that your average rock critic would actually agree with me about! Find out how Kate Bush got her groove back with her fifth LP, Hounds of Love, and whether she ever came down from that hill. Full transcript below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Ever since I first conceived the idea of Great Albums, I’ve always intended it to reflect nothing other than my own personal “canon”--not necessarily a list of albums that were influential, successful, or acclaimed by anybody’s standards but my own. But in this installment, I’m making a somewhat uncharacteristic move, and diving into an album that really doesn’t need me to advocate for it: Hounds of Love, by Kate Bush, often considered Bush’s greatest masterpiece--if not one of the greatest albums of all time.

Released in 1985, Hounds of Love was Bush’s fifth studio LP. Her career had started off surprisingly strong in 1977, with the release of her debut single “Wuthering Heights,” written when Bush was only 19 years old. With a high-concept theme, based around the titular novel by Emily Brontë, it would set the template for much of Bush’s subsequent career: irreverently eccentric, high-concept art-pop with the intensely personal passion of a singular singer-songwriter. But just how much patience for that sort of thing does the general public have, beyond letting the occasional “Wuthering Heights” through as a sort of novelty hit? Bush’s subsequent work in the early 1980s met with inconsistent reception, with her fourth LP, 1982’s The Dreaming, marking a particularly low point. The first album that Bush produced all by herself, The Dreaming took even more radical creative liberties, pushing her sound into increasingly experimental territory.

Music: “Get Out Of My House”

Following the fairly cold reception of The Dreaming, Bush took several years to produce her next album, but it would prove to be the one that redeemed her career, and arguably turned her into a bigger star than ever before. Hounds of Love managed to stay true to the core principles of the Bush aesthetic: moody and introspective, full of rich and complex narratives, as well as musical risk-taking. But it honed and refined that sound into something that was also remarkably pop.

Music: “Running Up That Hill”

“Running Up That Hill” was one of the biggest hits of Bush’s career, and arguably dethroned even “Wuthering Heights” as her signature song. I think the secret to its success is its ability to balance Bush’s experimental impulses with an intuitive, deep-felt emotional quality that makes her best work resonant in an accessible way. On paper, “Running Up That Hill” is as high-concept as anything else in Bush’s catalogue--a song about making a deal with God to swap sexes with your lover, and feel what life is like in another body? But at the same time, the song has an ability to “work” even if you don’t know all of that. Who hasn’t longed for a way to bargain with supernatural forces, for a chance at the impossible? There’s a certain applicability to its themes, which I think is a chief reason why it’s inspired so many covers and reimaginings over the years. But even when one listens to the original, the stately washes of digital synthesiser and the powerful conviction that propels Bush’s vocals make it easy to sympathize with. It feels grounded and physical, rooted in the most carnal aspect of the human body. Positioned as the opening track of the album, “Running Up That Hill” feels like an obvious lead single--in the best way possible. But it’s worth noting that not everything on the album is quite so radio-friendly.

Music: “Cloudbusting”

Perhaps one of Bush’s most compelling narratives, “Cloudbusting” is also, ostensibly, fairly high-concept, portraying a heavily fictionalized episode from the life of Wilhelm Reich. A controversial figure both in life and legacy, Reich is best remembered for his work in psychology, heavily influenced by the spectre of Sigmund Freud. But “Cloudbusting” focuses on his later-life fascination with the physical sciences, and his belief that a mystical energy called “orgone” was responsible for both human emotional woes as well as disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere. Reich attempted to develop a machine that could manipulate this energy, and hence achieve the longtime dream of technological weather control, but there’s no evidence his “cloudbuster” really worked, or that there’s any such thing as “orgone.” But Bush’s “Cloudbusting,” and its accompanying music video, portray Reich as a tragic hero, silenced by government authorities who sought to destroy what they couldn’t understand, conflating his work with cloudbusters with his censure by the FDA for his questionable medical devices.

The song was inspired chiefly by the memoirs of Wilhelm Reich’s son, Peter, with Bush explicitly portraying Peter’s naive childhood perspective on his father, and that does allow for some substantial nuance here...but at some point we have to ask ourselves what responsibility an artist has to the truth. “Cloudbusting” is the musical equivalent of a film that’s “based on a true story,” and I see no reason why music can’t be just as capable of spreading misinformation as the Oscar-bait biopics of Hollywood. Just how accurate, or how beautiful, does a work of art need to be, for us to allow a bit of playing loose with the facts for the sake of a great story?

Setting aside these quandaries presented by its subject matter, “Cloudbusting” undoubtedly delivers musically. Across its sprawling runtime, it develops and earns a sense of grandeur, building from its infectious percussion and cresting with Bush’s fragile, but assertive prayer: “I just know that something good is going to happen.” If you listen closely to the percussion tracks on the album, you’ll notice that there’s no cymbal or high-hat utilized anywhere, which helps give the album its particular hazy, meandering ambiance.

That effect is perhaps even more pronounced on the second side of the album. Hounds of Love is divided quite sharply into two sides. The first side, also sub-titled Hounds of Love, opens with “Running Up That Hill,” and finishes with “Cloudbusting,” which serves as something of a bridge between the two, combining a singable hook and a pop-like verse-chorus structure with a taste for more visionary narrative. While the first side is home to all four of the album’s singles, the second side, sub-titled The Ninth Wave, strays much further away from the standard expectations of pop.

Music: “Under Ice”

Going by the tracklisting, there are seven tracks that make up *The Ninth Wave,* though their smooth transitions and willful defiance of verse/chorus structure create a seamless oratorio or song cycle feel, not unlike many of the great “album sides” of the prog tradition. The Ninth Wave also departs from the feel of the first side in its instrumentation. While the Hounds of Love side has its fair share of exotic instruments, such as a balalaika on “Running Up That Hill” and a didgeridoo on “Cloudbusting,” The Ninth Wave is more richly baroque, with elements like that jarring violin on “Under Ice.” As it progresses, the breadth of timbres increases, climaxing in the Celtic-inspired “Jig of Life.”

Music: “Jig of Life”

The explosion of folkish, backward-looking sounds of “Jig of Life” and “Hello World,” with their fiddles, whistles, and full choir, represent its protagonist’s return to the realm of the living, after the trauma represented by earlier tracks like “Under Ice.” The abstract, though affecting, narrative presented by The Ninth Wave seems to be a tale of death and rebirth, with a narrator who drowns themselves, only to be reborn--whether literally revived from a failed suicide attempt, or metaphysically reincarnated after a passage through the realm of the dead.

Much more has been written about the themes of *The Ninth Wave* than I’m getting into here, but suffice it to say that many people consider it the relative highlight of the album. But I think it’s worth questioning that a little bit, and taking the time to look at Hounds of Love a bit more holistically. Just because the first side is a bit less overtly experimental doesn’t mean it doesn’t have just as much to offer, artistically, or that it isn’t a part of what makes this album truly great. At the end of the day, I think we can probably agree that far fewer people would have ever heard The Ninth Wave if it weren’t for those more accessible singles on side one, moving copies of the record and adding to Bush’s widespread acclaim. Without “Running Up That Hill,” Hounds of Love might have gone down in history as a fairly niche cult classic like The Dreaming, instead of the era-defining album that it got to become.

On the cover of Hounds of Love, we see an image of Bush reclining and embracing two dogs--who were, in fact, her own pets. The image’s saturation in purplish pink and Bush’s perhaps sultry expression combine to create an impression of traditional femininity, which resonates with the album’s themes of gender and sensuality. Framed in by large white borders, we might read the composition of the cover as evocative of a personal locket or memento, a sort of furtive glimpse into Bush’s more private or intimate essence, fitting for the introspective and emotional focus of much of the music. This “framing” is perhaps also evocative of the idea of the domestic sphere of life--and hence, again, of femininity.

While the title track of the album portrays the “hounds of love” as figures of menace, who are said to “chase” after its narrator, the submissive and comfortable-looking canines portrayed in the cover art seem like a foil to that idea. In the history of European art, dogs are often used as symbols of fidelity, particularly in the context of romance. Titian’s Venus of Urbino, painted in the 1530s, is often considered the progenitor of the Western “nude” as an archetype. Alongside the titular goddess, paragon of eroticism and the feminine, the painter has also included a lapdog, peacefully dozing beside her. It’s tempting to see the composition of the cover of Hounds of Love as doing something similar, invoking confident sensuality alongside a symbol of faithfulness to portray the essence of idealized love.

After the release of Hounds of Love, Bush would once again take several years to produce her next LP, 1989’s The Sensual World. More closely related to The Ninth Wave than the A-side of Hounds of Love, it was nonetheless another commercial and mainstream success for the artist.

Music: “The Sensual World”

From the mid-90s to the mid-00s, Bush took an extended hiatus from music, focusing instead on her family and her personal life. Despite uncertainty surrounding the future of her career, she would eventually return to the public spotlight in the 21st Century, and remains active, if somewhat intermittently, to the present day. At this point, it’s safe to say that Bush has a fairly enviable position, having lived long enough to become a cultural institution, and able to bask in the cult following her unmistakable and distinctive work has earned her. For as much as I’ve praised the more commercial side of Hounds of Love in this piece, I still believe in the power of the truly unfettered creative soul, and I’m still happy for Bush that she’s achieved that kind of freedom.

My favourite track from either side of Hounds of Love would have to be “The Big Sky.” In the context of the album, it stands out for its rousing, triumphant crescendo of energy--a marked difference from the languid, introspective sensibility that dominates most of the material. And it manages that without bringing the cymbals back, either! Thematically, its emphasis on weather and the sky prefigures that of “Cloudbusting,” perhaps providing a more hopeful and naive vision of what weather can do, which resists being “clouded” by political drama. That’s all I have for today--as always, thank you all for listening!

Music: “The Big Sky”

[deep-sea-skiving]

Today’s a boring day so I thought that I might as well share some of my Kate Bush collection. This is only the stuff I own which is music related. If anyone’s interested, I may later do a post about some of the many non-music Kate Bush memorabilia I have obtained throughout the years.

I have managed to get most, if not all of the official releases Kate Bush has made on CD. One notable exception is the ‘Kate Bush Live at the Hammersmith Odeon’ CD which came bundled with a VHS tape of the tour of life that occurred in 1979. Most of my CD collection is a mismatch of different versions and releases such as earlier EMI releases to re-masters under Kate Bush’s own Fish People label. None of these are especially rare but there are some which are a little unique. For instance, The Hounds of Love album is the 1997 remastered version which differs significantly from the later remastered editions of this album which have been released under the Fish People label. This version of the album includes the original album version of The Big Sky which has sadly been lost. Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m sure that if you buy the album today the version of The Big Sky which is featured is the special single mix, which has a slightly different introduction. This version is also unique in the fact that it includes 6 bonus tracks, the majority only being originally available as B sides. In my opinion this is the best version of the album which you can get on CD! You may be wondering or not why I have two copies of The Whole Story which is a greatest hits kind of album. Well one of these is ever so slightly different. One copy has an incredibly poor-quality insert, the booklet’s image is distorted and thinner than the other copy I have. According to my understanding this was because these copies got rushed out to meet the demand created by the announcement of the one-off 2014 shows. An interesting thing about the copy of Director’s Cut I own is that it’s the collector’s edition which includes an analogue mix of the Red Shoes album. It definitely sounds a lot better and warmer than the original digital mix.

I’ve only lately got into collecting Kate Bush albums on vinyl, so I haven’t got a lot yet! The vinyl versions of the Kick Inside and Lionheart are both first pressing which can be identified by their etchings. The Kick inside has the message ‘remember yourself’ etched into the dead wax and Lionheart has ‘hope you like it!’ engraved. The Sensual World is also an original first pressing but I cannot appear to find any message engraved into the vinyl.

To finish up here’s some of the most recent special releases, these tie into the release of new re-masters (2018) which saw a total remaster of the whole Kate Bush back catalogue. On the right there’s the Cloudbusting 12” picture disc which was released on the 24th of May 2019 and in the UK was an HMV exclusive (http://www.katebush.com/news/12-cloudbusting-picture-disc) Also, another weird release is the 12” single of Ne T’Enfuis pas. This was originally a French exclusive only available through FNAC (https://www.fnac.com/a13674158/Kate-Bush-Ne-t-enfuis-pas-Exclusivite-Fnac-Edition-Limitee-Maxi-vinyle) however, later just started to appear in HMV stores in the UK. It uses the same cover art as the he original French Ne T’Enfuis Pas / Un Baiser D’Enfant single from July 1983 but adds the remastered branding. This is a really strange release of an incredibly uncommon song with an unknown quantity pressed! 

[hopelesschromantic]

2017 Songs of My Year

2017 was traumatic for everyone, wasn’t it? And I was no exception. I learned a lot about myself in 2017, formed new relationships and suffered some collateral damage along the way.

In a way, this list is more personal than the years since I started this tradition in 2010, maybe in part because 2017 cut me deeper than a lot of years I’ve had. The highs were high, the lows were real low, and the learning curve was steep indeed.

January 

Frankie Knuckles, I’ll Take You There (ft. Jamie Principle)

The night of January 1, 2017, I sat in a loose state of undress on my living room floor, high and over-warm, in a state of mounting, spiraling dread. We listened to a Frankie Knuckles Boiler Room on Youtube and I struggled to find to words to explain that, eleven days after tying the knot, I knew something was very wrong and I didn’t know how to put it right. I missed my family at the ceremony. I missed the ocean. I missed feeling healthy and vital; the disease in my gut and the medication for it was already starting to exact a brutal toll on me. I missed not feeling afraid. Trump was about to be inaugurated. Christmas vacation was already over and the post-holiday and party slump was hitting me hard. The only thing that soothed me in those late hours were the synesthetic sunshine yellow chords from Frankie Knuckles promising that maybe it wasn’t as bad as I feared.

February

Just Us, Cloudbusting

February was a slight upturn with only patches of stomach churning horror and my mind turned to future training and projects as I took on new challenges at work and tried to ignore the continued dread that seeped into the edges of my life. The best thing about February was undoubtedly taking a trip to Edmonton to see one of my best friends, Eric. A dark mood hung over me that I couldn’t disguise but this old and faithful cover of one of my favorite Kate Bush songs buoyed me during the schlep from Saskatoon to Edmonton. Like the sun coming out, I just know that something good is going to happen echoes the audacious, sparkling optimism of the Frankie Knuckles track above. Despite the reality that it wasn’t *just us* I sang along to this song like a mantra. Just us, just us. Bust those clouds open and let in the sun.

March 

Goldfrapp, Ocean

I opened the month by drunkenly having sex with someone I shouldn’t while I was blacked out and the self-sabotage only continued. I learned I was capable of twisting myself in knots to belong, just like I’d done as a little girl and later a teenager. Don’t leave me behind. Take me with you. Once a passenger, always a passenger. As I fell for someone who never cared for me, I found myself unable to sleep, in a constant state of panic and dread, waiting for a confrontation I knew would never come, all the while terrified I would be quietly edged out of my own life, replaced by someone who didn’t even want my life. The intensity I felt was misdirected at the woman who became the object of my fascination, not because of anything about her but because of the lengths I’d go to participate in my own life as it went further off the rails. No boundaries. Let your love consume you and burn you to the wick. 

Goldfrapp’s “Ocean” reminds me of both the woman and myself; I’m the titular ocean, vast and mercurial and she’s the narrator of the song, the people collector, the one who wouldn’t lie. But of course she would.

April

Yaeji, Passionfruit

April was more tranquil, for me at least. I’ve learned I overcome pain and humiliation quickly, and that’s a blessing at least. This tranquil remix of Drake’s Passionfruit played a lot during the month of April, with it’s cold lyrical indictments, muted vocals, deep, ebbing beats, all delivered in distant, minimal space. It echoed my emotions well. Numb, healing, detached. I still hadn’t felt the return of my sense of safety, the seismic sense that my love life and my health could change at any moment would stay with me for months to come.

May 

Joe Goddard, Music is the Answer

By May I had enough distance from the misery of March and April that I could catch my breath. My world had shrunk over the past few years and I felt a powerful need to expand it, to connect with people outside my small circle, with the hopes of establishes more people in my life who wouldn’t take my energy and warmth for granted, people who wouldn’t be compelled to compare me unfavorably to my partner. I was missing the kind of intimacy that comes from having someone in your life beyond your partner, people who care deeply about you and is warm and caring and intimate. May was a month of burgeoning connections and false starts, like a false spring, but a spring nonetheless. Joe Goddard’s video heightens the track, the lost war satellite in search of its target, not unlike my nascent forays into finding a connection to someone far, far away.

June 

Kaityn Aurelia Smith, An Intention

In June we went to Calgary to visit one of my best friends, Alan, and managed to see Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at Studio Bell, a cavernous and breathtaking cathedral of music in Calgary’s East Village. KAS stood in front of us with her analogue synth and her trippy light show and for the length of her show I was suspended in this psychedelic pastoral wetland, all shimmering tadpoles and dividing cells. I came away from the experience euphoric, feeling like I’d transcended something immense, learned important secrets of creation.

July 

Brandon Flowers, Never Get You Right

I revisited this song when I was feel particularly alone as my attempts to connect to different people around me crumbled before me and I heard some bad reviews of my behavior through the grapevine. Was it worth it, trying to be known and understood? Is that all I wanted? Or was I asking for too much? Was there anyone I could connect with enough that I trusted their review or was I really at sea? They’ll turn you into something whether you are it or not. Yes of course, a worthwhile reminder that this misunderstanding, this feeling of being unknowable and isolated isn’t particular to me but instead a universal.

August 

Carly Rae Jepson, Cut to the Feeling

August long weekend started with one of my best friends Chris coming to Saskatoon. We had an amazing time, the highlight of which was Brock’s DJ set at Pink. CRJ reminds me of Chris and when Brock played this song, the room lit up and I had the rare and glorious feeling that I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

September

Galantic - Hey Alligator

It’s sugary and gay and over the top as all Galantis is want to be but this song soundtracked the last of lonely Saturday nights at home, flitting about the kitchen cooking or chatting up veritable strangers on the internet, which was not ultimately a particularly gay activity but this track makes me feel like the last word in gay. Some of the relationships I’d formed online at that time had started to go septic and I started wondering what it was about me that lead me to seek out such unsatisfying and ultimately destructive connections. My introspection started with this song and continued over the coming months.

October

Shura, White Light

If I had a single song that spoke to my personal process and internal conflict this year, it was this one. Morgan put me on to it, indeed put it on me, and I became addicted to it, playing it literally dozens of times and in every mood. Shura’s sweet, breathy voice purrs intimately on the track while electropop burbles around her. Her lyrics speak to a blinding intensity, a seductive and almost alien nature or for my purposes a fictive personality manufactured to elicit validation but ultimately flimsy. But at the same time I felt like a part of me that had never been properly seen was given space to flourish. Intense and intimate, this aspect of myself could give with abandon because the people I was giving to were many miles away, sometimes on different continents, a safe distance for my heart and body and real life, practically in space. You're from another planet/And I'd like you to take me there/You can fly your alien spaceship

November 

Miguel, Told You So 

November swam by so quickly. In the first couple weeks Eric came to visit completely by surprise and we had the most ideal, chill time and I’ve been craving it ever since.

Miguel’s War and Leisure is without a doubt one of my favorite albums of the year and Told You So was my favorite track. The song is pure romance, sunlight, promises of fantasy and romance and escape and yet we from Miguel that the video for this track is a protest video, shot in the desert, missiles falling in the sky just as others launch. There’s an air of dread and voyeurism to the video, meant to refer to the political world in the Trump era but it felt true of my life too. Did I really understand all the changes I’d undergone in 2017? For good and for ill? The practice I’d had setting boundaries but also the increasing social anxiety? The strain that living more truthfully had put on my closest relationships? 

December

Sasha ft. Poliça, Out of Time

I don’t usually have much to say to trance as a musical genre but this track is a common thread throughout my 2017. Brock played this track to great appreciation at the rainy and isolated little Solstice Festival back in June and reprised it, mostly for me, at a miserable, failing Saskatoon club called Eclipse in the first week of December. 

This track is airy, cavernous, with juicy, acidy beats throughout and Channy Leaneagh’s throaty, disembodied voice haunting the track. Yes, we are out of time. Out of time for Christmas. Out of time to change, to do better in 2017. Time moves so much faster than I handle and it scares me.

Song of the Year: 

The 1975, Somebody Else

I’ve listened to this song with all my friends, Brock and Morgan most of all. Definitely most played in 2017. 

Ignore if you want the three minute Lynchian introduction that carries on from where Change of Heart leaves off, but I can’t. Twin Peaks was a part of my year and the Lynch references with the doppelgangers and rabbits on the wall were impossible to ignore. Matty Healy splits himself into twos, threes, fours, and more as he mourns what he’s lost and revels in self-pity, excess and self-destruction. It all seems terribly familiar.

In the video for this track, Matty Healy wanders through the ugly concrete cityscape that I think is Manchester, surrounded by green-blue twilight, neon lights, reflective surfaces and gathering storms. He undersings all but the bridges, were his gently screwed and chopped voice hits registers beyond his range, translating on the track to keen and visceral pining interspersed with chilly ambivalence--my entire process of untangling my mind, my desires from someone else’s. 

Over the course of the song I lose track of Matty Healy’s gender and orientation, mostly because he invites it, but in that moment it’s easy for me to assume his perspective--something I usually find impossible in bands with guitars fronted by men. In that moment I’m thinking about who I am with and without love in my life, how I choose to define myself in and outside of relationships and my role in shaping them. This year has seen huge growth and painful realizations for my heart and head but the way forward is through.