Maximum Rhythm and Muse: Kate Bush Returns Triumphant With Aerial
Written: Dec 03 '05
Product Rating:
Pros: Quite possibly the best record of her career.
Cons: You might just forget to breathe.
The Bottom Line: In which the author climbs a mountain, figures Pi, and becomes panoramic in the ocean by the light of the moon and the singing of birds.
Listening to any Kate Bush record is like surveying a foreign landscape, perusing an ancient map, or examining a photographic magnification of a patch of human skin. It is full of amplified bumps and textures, layers of sonic geology – and it seems to come from an utterly unfamiliar, inexplicable place. With the possible exception of Bjork, Kate Bush has been, and remains, the most quintessentially enigmatic female singer-songwriter working in the last thirty years. Her songs are possessed of both a delicate, almost archetypal beauty, and oozy insinuations of darkness.
Like kindred spirit Peter Gabriel (with whom she memorably dueted on 1986's "Don’t Give Up"), Kate Bush builds her songs of love, anger, death, childbirth and motherhood, solitude, nature and mathematics (and various combinations thereof) around slinky, Otherworld rhythms, and imbues them with a sense of literature and history, not just through her poetic lyrics and mannered delivery, but also in her arrangements, which often make use of musical instruments indigenous to other cultures, or other times. She may occasionally veer into overtly precious territory, but her fearless sense of whimsy, her penchant for playful exploration, can hardly be faulted.
Bush's new album Aerial, her first studio record since Bill Clinton's first term of office, is actually two coherent stand-alone albums in one. The first entitled A Sea of Honey; the second A Sky of Honey. And though the two may be held together by both packaging, and the elaborately lovely art direction (this is one of those albums where the packaging alone is worth the price), each disc has its own unique mood and a complementary set of themes.
In the snow with Rosebud...
The songs of A Sea of Honey are highly individualized - seven of what the Lifetime Network would call intimate portraits - each with its own distinctive vibe.
Album opener (and lead single) "King of the Mountain" poses a series of questions to Elvis over a winding, insistent synthesizer climb; and as she sings "the wind is whistling through the house", woozy background vocals swoop down, whip around and blow cold snow over the song's remote summit (an effect echoed several times over the course of both records). There's a concrete sense of loneliness and majesty that feels especially potent coming from someone who - quite the opposite of Elvis - has seen stardom up close and withdrawn from it.
"King of the Mountain" is only the most immediate of these songs, but they all reveal themselves slowly, deliberately over repeated listens, each one as wondrous and mysterious as the next. Over a trigonometrically snaking bassline and pulsing keyboards, Kate Bush sings of a man who 'loves, he loves, he loves, he loves, he does love his numbers' on "Pi", whose verses eventually become nothing more than that endlessly wandering number itself.
"Bertie" is a Renaissance love song to her son, while "Mrs. Bartolozzi" is a long, meandering piano ballad of a woman woh pours her passion into her laundry; meanwhile Kate Bush finds herself in the shadows on the peripheries of the battlefield where Joan of Arc is captured in "Joanni", all to the whirl of a witchy Meditteranean melody; and "The Coral Room" ponders the ruins of a vast underwater society through the eyes of a mermaid and her mother.
If it all seems a little precious, as if it came from a young girl's crowded shelf of storybooks, the toughness of the rhythms upon which these songs are built - the dark funky throb of "How to be Invisible", the wintery, determined trudging of "Joanni" - keep the songs grounded an concrete. And ultimately, none are as gentle as they appear on first listen.
The day is full of birds...
A Sea of Honey is, in every way, a quintessential Kate Bush record - arty, studied, lovely - but the most immediate point of reference for its sister disc A Sky of Honey (for me at least) is Pink Floyd's The Wall. Following a cryptically defined narrative arc in its contemplations of nature ("Sunset") and love ("Prologue") and creation ("An Architect's Dream"), the record progresses from pasture to painting to piano to a hot night of tide-washed sex with a dizzying, at times even psychotic, sense of purpose.
Where the songs of the first disc are separate and unique from one another, the songs of the second bleed into each other like a drop of color oozing through a puddle of water, all to the sounds of birds, both real and imagined. The record opens with a little boy wondering at those birdsongs - sounds like they're saying words. And he's right. So much so, that by the end of the disc, Kate Bush herself will be laughing hysterically to their sounds.
If the songs of Sea sound like they came from storybooks, then Sky fully inhabits a dreamy, post-coital surreality, subterranean and subconscious (but rocking, nevertheless), that culminates magnificently in "Nocturn", an oceanic nine minute seduction, Kate Bush drawing her words out long and smooth like fingers trailing down naked flesh - could be in a dream, our clothes are on the beach - over a firm, minimal syncopation. Once again, there's a chorus of Kates singing the bridge with a woozy oscillation reminiscent of a warped vinyl record - a sea of honey, a sky of a honey - before a ferocious gang of voices break into an urgent chant, the drums getting louder, more tribal, more animal as it goes: look at the night, and all the times it's a-changing, look at the night!
Somewhere in between the waxing and waning wave...
The temptation when an artist releases an ambitious double-disc effort is to favor one record over the other, especially when the records in question are vastly different from each other as they are here, but in the case of Aerial the two separate works work in each other's favor, each adding dimension and insight to the other. In a way that isn't really obvious, and despite the fact that both are long and cohesive enough to stand on their own, these two records really belong to each other.
And taken as a whole Aerial is definitely the kind of album worth a 12 year wait - full of enough wonder and mystery (and don't forget the rock!) to keep us listeners coming back and exploring it again and again for the next twelve years. An absolute masterpiece.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Aerial" by Kate Bush
Columbia Records
Released 11/8/05
Produced by Kate Bush
80 min.
SONGS:
A Sea of Honey:
King of the Mountain - Pi - Bertie - Mrs. Bartolozzi - How to be Invisible - Joanni - A Coral Room
A Sky of Honey:
Prelude - Prologue - An Architect's Dream - The Painter's Link - Sunset - Aerial Tal - Somewhere in Between - Nocturn - Aerial
The fact that the world has been waiting for the release of her eighth album, Aerial , for more than a decade has, if anything, only added to the air ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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