I’m glad that I inserted The Kick Inside as a personal suggestion, as it shows the contrast between there and here. Bush's debut was much more conventional in musical style compared to this, which takes bits of New Wave and blends them into strange and unusual beats. If The Kick Inside was the work of a talented young girl, this one is the work of a self-assured woman, confident enough to experiment and push the boundaries of her sound.
If feels like she’s taken a lot of inspiration from her musical pal Peter Gabriel, as there are similarities in sound to his third album (where she appeared, uncredited, as backing vocals). Sat In Your lap explodes onto the start of the album with pounding frenetic drum beats (akin to the popular Burundi drumming of this time) and synth stabs, a frantic song that sounds like it might be about unquenchable consumerism, but is actually about an unquenchable thirst for knowledge – very Kate Bush.
The glorious dark weirdness (with strange post-production effects on the vocals) of Leave It Open has a strong Gabriel influence, while Get Out Of My House, with its heavy drums, distant screams and nonsense vocals bring to mind some of Siouxsie And The Banshees’ work, a brilliantly disturbing album-closer.
At times, Bush affects some rather ill-advised accents – a kind of wandering Mockney for the crime drama There Goes A Tenner (part oompah band, part Cockney knees-up, part reggae) while on The Dreaming her Aussie accent is slightly more consistent, an “Australiana” piece about the exploitation of natural resources by European Australians and the effect on the indigenous population. This flirts with world music, with a bit of didgeridoo (from Rolf Harris, before he was a problematic figure). Night Of The Swallow uses Irish folk music (by members of Planxty and The Chieftans on the likes of the penny whistle and uillean pipes). This one is the most alike in sound to The Kick Inside, a kind of ersatz Irish ballad.
As with Gabriel, Bush is unafraid to leap all over the place in terms of lyric and topics. Smugglers in the Jamaica Inn adjacent Night Of The Swallow, for example. Pull Out The Pin tracks the inner thoughts of an assassin stalking their victim in the jungles of the Vietnam War, Bush screaming out the refrain of “I love life” in stark contrast to the surrounding dark soundscape. Houdini is kind of a thematic mirror image to Wuthering Heights – in that song, Bush takes the role of Kathy’s ghost haunting Heathcliff (in the novel possibly a figment of his own guilty conscience); in the track Houdini she plays the role of Houdini’s widow trying to make contact with the spirit of her dead husband (an experiment arranged by the two to test the truth of the afterlife, apparently) [Spoiler alert: it didn't work].
This is one Kate Bush album that I didn’t ever have a copy of (apart from Sat In Your Lap and The Dreaming on compilations) as I was warned that it was “the weird one”. I should have given it a chance, because although sometimes the experiments don’t quite work (mostly due to dodgy accents, and sometimes over-produced), the tracks are great.
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