Music

Kate Bush: countdown to Aerial

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I’m not a Kate Bush fan; I got one album Hounds of Love and like the obvious singles (“Wuthering Heights”, “Running up That Hill” “Cloudbuster”) but that’s it. Reinder Dijkhuis on the other hand is enough of a fan to have all her albums. In honour of the upcoming release of her new album, Aerial, he has provided reviews of all her albums:

  • Countdown to Aerial 1: The Kick Inside
    I have no memory of a world without Kate Bush’s music. I suppose it must have been 1978 or 1980 when I first heard “Wuthering Heights”, and my musical memories simply don’t stretch back much further. I’ve pretty much always been a fan of her work, even when I only knew it as “that strange song with the high voice”.
  • Countdown to Aerial 2: Lionheart
    It’s true, I’ll admit, that Kate’s second record doesn’t surprise the way her debut does, but on its own
    merits, it’s a very strong album. There’s no sense at all that the songs were mere leftovers from the previous batch – more likely they were deliberately kept in reserve.
  • Countdown to Aerial 3: Never For Ever
    Never For Ever has quite a few rocking moments (she sounds like Nina Hagen in “Violin” and “The Wedding List”) and uses dynamics and crescendo a lot in the arrangements, so playing it at high volume definitely improves it.
  • Countdown to Aerial 4: The Dreaming
    The Dreaming is not merely the best Kate Bush record; it’s THE BEST RECORD EVER MADE BY ANYONE IN THE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC!!! It’s perfect from beginning to end: strange, innovative, melodic, exciting, packed with raw emotion, violence and clever storytelling. It also has Kate braying like a donkey.
  • Countdown to Aerial 5: Hounds of Love
    Hounds of Love, then, is really two great albums compressed into 40-odd minutes’ playing time. It’s essential. The 1997 remaster has a few bonus tracks that are okay; a bit of a grab bag to be honest.
  • Countdown to Aerial 6: The Sensual World
    There’s plenty that’s good on the record though. The title track is lush and erotic – Kate is probably the only arranger who can make uillean pipes sound sexy.
  • Countdown to Aerial 7: The Red Shoes
    […]on the whole, The Red Shoes is listenable. It gets the odd spin at the studio, from people other than me, even. It just… doesn’t grab, doesn’t irritate, doesn’t connect.
  • Countdown to Aerial 8: Aerial
    For the most part, though, the album sticks to the background, prettily washing over this one listener
    just like much of the previous record did. There is, on the whole, more to pique the interest in the first
    disk, the collection of Kate songs, than in the second, conceptual one, but in both, there simply isn’t enough.

Hefner

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cover of We Love the City

I discovered the UK band Hefner sometime in 2000, when a friend pointed me at their song “I stole a Bride“, one of the few pop songs to be written about the Trojan War and the abduction of Helena by Paris. I quite like their sound, sort of indie but with a bit more bite than a band Like say Belle and Sebastian and clever but not too pretentious lyrics. Their best album was We Love the City, released in 2000, sort of a thematic ode to London, which sort of captures my feelings about London as well.

The band is no longer active, but their site is still up. The best part of it is the discography, with extensive notes by Darren Hayman, the driving force behind the band. I wish more bands took the trouble to do something like this.

Darren Hayman since then has started a new band, The french with one of his Hefner mates, which has abandonded the indie sound Hefner had for most of its existence, instead going for a more early electronica feel. A sample of their work can be downloaded from their site, again something I wouldn’t mind more other bands doing.