This is Kate Bush's fourth record and it was the one where her artistic vision matured and she took full control of the recording process. Bush Abandoned her girlish falsetto-style of singing that she is still most famous and began singing in a more natural singing voice. Her lyrics also became increasingly complex. This is one of her more complex albums and when it came out in 82(one year younger than me!)it flopped, the record failed to spawn any hit singles in the same vein as her huge breakthrough hit Wuthering Heights.
The dreaming is one of the dreamier albums and much of the albums sounds like a surrelastic dream always threatening to tip over into a nightmare. Musically it's equally ambitious with lots of background effects and lots of Kate Bush's piano(wich by the way is her ONLY similarity to Tori Amos. On this album Bush also made heavy use of the fairlight synthesizer that she had recently been introduced to. What about the songs? well, there's ten of them...
1 - Sat In Your Lap
Rumbling drums and stabbed piano chords. In this song Bush sings about wanting wisdom but lacking the energy to put any effort into it. One of the albums simpler songs and it was released as a single.
2 - There Goes A Tenner
A song heavy on piano and fairlights. This song describes a nightmarish version of a robbery as told by one of the robbers. This is one of the songs that really feel like a dream and it features a lot of surrealistic details such as when the robbers partners are compared to actors:
Both my partners,
you are Bogart
He is George Raft
That leaves Cagney and me.
Lots of background voices both by Kate and some male ones as well.
3 - Pull Out The Pin
Another nightmarish song that describes a vietnamese stalking an american soldier and slowly closing in for the kill. Once again the story is told from the viewpoint of the perpetrator not the victim. The Music is slow and dramatic featuring Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame on backing vocals.
4 - Suspended in Gaffa
one of the musically more upbeat songs that describes the feeling of being stuck and unable to get loose.
Suddenly my feet are feet of mud
it all goes slow-mo
I don't know why I'm crying
Am I suspended in Gaffa?
what Bush is stuck in is hard to tell and this is the case with most of her lyrics, she tells twisted stories and very seldom gets personal, prefering to hide behind a character. By the way Gaffa is a kind of duct tape...
5 - Leave It Open
Yet another strange dreamy song. Has a vocal chorus repeating the sentence Harm is in us that grows more intense later exploding with powerful drumming. Uses some of Bush's trademark weird vocal effects here a reverse reverse recording. She first recorded the line We Let The Weirdness in backwards and learned how it sounded in reverse, then sang the reverse line and reversed that recording to get the sentence turned right. This makes her this line that is sung near the end of the song sound extremley ghostly.
6 - The Dreaming
This song is about Australias aboriginals and how their culture and land has been destroyed from contact with western civilization complete with Digeridu playing.
7 - Night Of The Swallow
A slow piano ballad that suddenly picks up tempo and becomes an irish jig with fiddle and pipes before slowing down again. in this song a woman first pleads to her love not to fly away and then the lyrics take of with the flight theme as the lyrics sings about the flying a plane and hiding from enemies. A good guess would be that the narrative takes place during the first or second world war but it's really hard to tell.
8 - All The Love
One of the albums darkest tracks with lyrical imagery full of death. A person seems to lament all the love he/she did not give during his/her life. Uses a choir boy soprano backing vocalist to give the music and even ghostlier effect.
9 - Houdini
Is based on a turn of events after Houdini's death. When his wife was contacted by a medium that claimed to be in contact with Houdini's spirit and managed to pass along a messeage in a code Houdini had constructed. The whole thing turned out to be a bluff as the medium had gotten ahold of some of Houdini's notebooks. The song focuses on the brief time that she actually belived she was in contact with her dead husband. A romantic ballad that turns hysteric as it describes Houdini's death.
10 - Get Out Of My House
another song filled with nightmarish images as a woman baricades up her house trying to stop a man from gaining entrance.
As said this album flopped and Bush was proclaimed a has-been until her return to commercial success with her next album the epic The Hounds Of Love. The reason for the albums lack of success is it's musical experimentalism and it's dense lyrics on Hounds of Love she divided up the album between these denser songs and some lighter pop songs. I that this album is on of Bush's greatest and highly reccomend it. Kate Bush was an innovator that paved the way for the many talented female solo artists that have emerged during the nineties although she herself has remained quiet for the past eight years.
Here's to hoping she will make another record some time!
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