Kate Bush - Aerial

Prologue

I waited long and listened hard, trying to arrive at a definitive opinion on this, the first album from La Bush in twelve years. Then I realised that my opinions of almost all the records I own are pretty fluid, and I can end up revising my opinion of entire albums over a year after I've heard them for the first time. So, is this one any good?

Yes it is, though sometimes I feel like adding a qualifier to that.

Me and Kate go back over 15 years. I remember seeing the video for Cloudbusting when I was in my early teens, and startled by the amount of personality in what can often be a very tedious art form for getting across the essence of a song and its band. From then I was hooked, and my sister's copy of The Whole Story was fair game. Soon after that, I got my hands on The Sensual World, which was part of the soundtrack to my sometimes miserable first attempt at higher education. One of the strengths of Kate Bush is how she simply doesn't anything like anyone else at all, and on that album it was all there. Rock outs, love songs, ethereal dream sequences, everything. One song on it, This Rocket's Tail, made singers like Robert Plant sound like petulant little brats, and that was down to the fact that she can still hold a note while howling and shrieking through a passage, and that's one of her main strengths. I discovered more of this kind of melodrama on the Hounds of Love, while working my way backwards through her catalogue.

There wasn't much howling and shrieking on the more mellow follow-up, The Red Shoes, but it still had some great moments in spite of that, the most prominent in my mind being Moments of Pleasure.

Aerial is a bit like that. It's mellow, she doesn't cut loose like on her earlier albums, and this is why she'll appeal to a certain portion of the easily-listening crowd. There's no wailing declarations of lost love or anger due to some abstract event, but there is still plenty of dreamlike compositions and abstract reference points. Songs like Bertie and Mrs. Bartolozzi, the latter of which sees her describing the minutiae of her doing her laundry(!), refer to her domestic bliss, A Coral Room has flashes of a plane crashing and an underwater city, and An Architect's Dream and The Painter's Link feature Rolf Harris (yes Puppy, you were right that time!) joining in singing about the easel and the brush, so to speak. Some of the songs also revolve around Birdsong, and the pattern on the album cover actually represents the sound wave pattern of the song of a blackbird.

The song I've linked to above is one of the better ones, and a good indication of the overall feel of the album.

(Goddammit! I can't type this entry without the CD skipping. Windows XP multitasking, my arse.)

So there you go. She still has it, even if she's reigning herself a little days. It's still a worthy buy. Just don't expect any Ninth-Waveisms.

Going by her current rate of output, we can expect the next one in 2017.