“It’s in the trees! It’s coming right at us!”
“It” of course, being the huge buzz surrounding Stranger Things that resurrected Running Up That Hill. Once again I’m glad that I added in The Kick Inside as my own suggestion, because you can hear a progression through Bush’s music from the music on that album – slightly girlish but with an edge of the unusual to it, via Dimery’s suggestion of The Dreaming with its New Wave experimentation, through to this where it really feels like Bush has honed her songwriting skills to a fine point, every aspect of the songs on this album exactly where it needs to be. If the prior two albums felt a little over-produced in places, here, although the production values are rich, they don’t take you out of a track.
Take, for example, the little tense strings motif running underneath Hounds Of Love, that steadily build over the gated reverb drums, punctuated by Bush’s “doo doo do-do doo” backing vocal embellishments and the steady growth of the string drone, it really builds the track.
And although this album features the ubiquitous Fairlight synth and Linn drum machine, and falls within the “sophisti-pop” umbrella, the sense it evokes is a lot more emotive and less cerebral than the likes of Prefab Sprout or Scritti Politti. Maybe because as with The Dreaming, Bush’s music sounds closer to that of her friend Peter Gabriel, painting images with the sounds rather than necessarily telling stories.
That said, there’s a narrative to Cloudbusting – the third song inspired by eccentric inventor (or total crank) Wilhelm Reich to crop up on albums on this list, which I’ve alluded to before on Hawkwind’s Space Ritual and Patti Smith’s Horses (where other Reich songs occur). Reich tried to use his system of tubes from the “orgone accumulater” to affect the weather, and this song is based on the true experience of Reich’s son as his father was arrested for selling fraudulent cures. As a piece of music, it mirrors Running Up That Hill by building over a chugging relentless beat with almost tribal elements.
I could see Gabriel’s inspirational effects behind the tracks on Side Two as well, a suite collectively known as The Ninth Wave. It’s a piece of female point-of-view prog-based music, as much as a hallucinatory journey as Raul’s journey in The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, but one fraught with motherly love, the sense of loss and suffocation, using drowning metaphors. Waking The Witch, with its switch from comforting to disturbing, has some of the creepy images of things like Gabriel’s Slippermen, like a flight through Hell.
Bush plays with Irish music again with a better result than on The Dreaming, with The Jig Of Life and Hello Earth having elements of Eastern European music as well, a kind of folk-dance drone with musicians with the unmistakably Irish names of Donal Lonny (bodhran), John Sheehan (whistles) and Liam O’Flynn (uillean pipes). Compare and contrast to The Pogues a couple of days ago, and it shows the versatility of Irish folk. Hello Earth then blends into Georgian choral singing, just to add that extra bit of mystery and exoticism.
This isn't the first album to have a very different feel to each side (something becoming less of a relevance with the onset of the CD format), but it does it well. Side One some sensuous and evocative tunes fraught with emotion, Side Two the experimental journey that evokes both comfort and discomfort in equal measure. I really liked this one, a very solid album. Possibly Bush's best? Certainly so far.
Comments
Post a Comment