Kate Bush
First, the droning—soft and constant, otherworldly. Next the drum-beat, dense and mumming; it sounds like thunder, it sounds like a heartbeat. Finally, the synth riff, clouds rolling across faraway hills. So begins ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’, the opening track of Kate Bush’s 1985 album, The Hounds of Love. A song that sounds like a dream; an album that sounds astral.
A great deal of Bush’s music possesses an oneirological quality. Both in terms of soundscape—Bush’s production is always vast and delphic, that feeling where the details of dream slip away as you awaken—and in terms of lyrics: Bush sings about her own experiences rarely, instead choosing to write from the perspective of characters. This propensity for plucking narratives out of what seems like thin-air lends her an oracle-like quality, which has been ridiculed as often as it has been celebrated. As Mararget Talbot writes in The New Yorker, “And yet—in part because she emerged into the public eye at just eighteen, and with ‘Wuthering Heights,’ surely the most literary and therefore one of the strangest hit singles in history—Bush struck some people as a wide-eyed sprite to whom music somehow happened, not an artist fully in command of her own ideas and craft.” The Hounds of Love has always struck me as both a refutation and an embrace of the characterisation Talbot describes.
On the one hand, the album is intricately constructed, made up of two halves. The first is the eponymous Hounds of Love (which, for the sake of clarity, I will be referring to as THoL to distinguish it from the album holistically). A collection of five discrete tracks, THoL contains some of the best pop songs ever written. The second half is a concept suite titled The Ninth Wave, seven interlocking tracks which form a cohesive narrative about a woman floating in water—Ophelia-like—half-drowned, half-lucid. The Hounds of Love was Bush’s follow-up to the critical and commercial failure The Dreaming (1982) which was—unjustly—maligned for being too clever, too writerly, and overproduced. If the strike against Bush was that she wasn’t in control of her music, then The Dreaming was viewed as her trying too hard to compensate. With The Hounds of Love Bush doubled down, went hermetic: she built her own 24-track studio, she used the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, and she wrote every song solo. People called her overproduced; she would see how overproduced she could become
And yet, for all her tinkering, the result is an album that feels like it happened to her—through her, as a conduit. I don’t write this to detract from her talent. Rather I mean it as a complement: from its opening moments—that aforementioned droning on ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ to the bittersweet guitar plucking on ‘The Morning Fog’—Bush’s music feels something beyond the limits of human creation. Divine in the most traditional sense of the world.
