FEATURE:
Before We Flip the Vinyl…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional shot for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay
Kate Bush’s Best Side One/First Half Closers
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IN previous features…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
I have ranked Kate Bush’s opening and closing tracks. I have ranked her albums and pretty much covered every angle. I have not ranked her album side one closers. These are the songs that would end the first side of a vinyl or, in the case of a double vinyl, the first side of the first vinyl (rather than the second side). Maybe we would not notice on a CD or streaming, but there is great importance when it comes to the tracks that end the first side/half. It keeps us gripped at the end, so that we are excited flipping over that album! Bush is masterful when it comes to sequencing and making sure the strongest tracks are assorted so that you get this even experience. Because of that, it has been tough ranking the songs! In the case of the 2005 double album, Aerial, it is the final song on the first side of the first vinyl; the same goes for Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow. Some might be surprised regarding the number-one choice. I am not necessarily judging it based on which side closer is my favourite song. More, which track, in the context of the entire album, ends the first side best. Here are the side one closers from her amazing…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985
TEN studio albums.
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10. Egypt – Never for Ever
Album Release Date: 8th September, 1980
Producers: Kate Bush/Jon Kelly
Label: EMI
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/kate-bush/never-for-ever-0e80c456-fc19-41c7-85b8-6574e9091658/lp
Review:
“You listen to all of these records in sequence and good as The Kick Inside is, it’s just very apparent that the songwriting has gone up a gear with Never Forever. Strident, diverse, and intense Never Forever is the last Bush album with batshit mental prog art, the last album with an outside producer (though she co-produced with Jon Kelly), and the last record before she started using her beloved Fairlight synthesiser/sampler. It was also her third album in three years, that preempted the first meaningful gap in her career - you could point at the ways in which it predicts The Dreaming and call it a transitional album, but the truth is Never for Ever feels like the [apotheosis] of Leotard-era Kate Bush. The songs are just dazzlingly strong and distinctive. There are singles: ‘Babooska’ is a lot of fun, and the closing one-two of the eerie ‘Army Dreamers’ and the apocalyptic ‘Breathing’ is remarkable. But there’s a hell of a lot of little-remembered gold amongst the album tracks: the breakneck ‘Violin’ and tongue-in-cheek murder ballad ‘The Wedding List’ are really extraordinarily good pieces of songwriting. (8)” – Drowned in Sound
9. Heads We're Dancing – The Sensual World
Album Release Date: 17th September, 1989
Producer: Kate Bush
Label: EMI
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/kate-bush/the-sensual-world-e4747d6f-f1a1-4c91-bc7d-c5562cef6288
Review:
“An enchanting songstress, Kate Bush reflects the most heavenly views of love on the aptly titled The Sensual World. The follow-up to Hounds of Love features Bush unafraid to be a temptress, vocally and lyrically. She's a romantic, frolicking over lust and love, but also a lover of life and its spirituality. The album's title track exudes the most sensually abrasive side of Bush, but she is also one to remain emotionally intact with her heart and head. The majority of The Sensual World beams with a carefree spirit of strength and independence. "Love and Anger," which features blistering riffs by Bush's mentor and cohort David Gilmour, thrives on self-analysis -- typically cathartic of Bush. Michael Nyman's delicate string arrangements allow the melodic "Reaching Out" to simply arrive, freely floating with Bush's lush declaration ("reaching out for the star/reaching out for the star that explodes") for she's always searching for a common peace, a commonality to make comfort. What makes this artist so intriguing is her look toward the future -- she appears to look beyond what's present and find a peculiar celestial atmosphere in which human beings do exist. She's conscious of technology on "Deeper Understanding" and of a greater life on the glam rock experimental "Rocket's Tail (For Rocket)," yet she's still intrinsic to the reality of an individual's heart. "Between a Man and a Woman" depicts pressure and heartbreak, but it's the beauty of "This Woman's Work" that makes The Sensual World the outstanding piece of work that it is. She possesses maternal warmth that's surely inviting, and it's something that's made her one of the most prolific female singer/songwriters to emerge during the 1980s. She's never belonged to a core scene. Bush's intelligence, both as an artist and as a woman, undoubtedly casts her in a league of her own” – AllMusic
8. Lily – Director’s Cut
Album Release Date: 16th May, 2011
Producer: Kate Bush
Labels: Fish People/EMI
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/kate-bush/director-s-cut-23cb82bf-539f-4cfd-a97b-a846f8e0dbdf
Review:
“During her early career, Kate Bush released albums regularly despite her reputation as a perfectionist in the studio. Her first five were released within seven years. After The Hounds of Love in 1985, however, the breaks between got longer: The Sensual World appeared in 1989 and The Red Shoes in 1993. Then, nothing before Aerial, a double album issued in 2005. It's taken six more years to get The Director's Cut, an album whose material isn't new, though its presentation is. Four of this set's 11 tracks first appeared on The Sensual World, while the other seven come from The Red Shoes. Bush's reasons for re-recording these songs is a mystery. She does have her own world-class recording studio, and given the sounds here, she's kept up with technology. Some of these songs are merely tweaked, and pleasantly so, while others are radically altered. The two most glaring examples are "Flower of the Mountain" (previously known as "The Sensual World") and "This Woman's Work." The former intended to use Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's novel Ulysses as its lyric; Bush was refused permission by his estate. That decision was eventually reversed; hence she re-recorded the originally intended lyrics. And while the arrangement is similar, there are added layers of synth and percussion. Her voice is absent the wails and hiccupy gasps of her youthful incarnation. These have been replaced by somewhat huskier, even more luxuriant and elegant tones. On the latter song, the arrangement of a full band and Michael Nyman's strings are replaced by a sparse, reverbed electric piano which pans between speakers. This skeletal arrangement frames Bush's more prominent vocal which has grown into these lyrics and inhabits them in full: their regrets, disappointments, and heartbreaks with real acceptance. She lets that voice rip on "Lilly," supported by a tougher, punchier bassline, skittering guitar efx, and a hypnotic drum loop. Bush's son Bertie makes an appearance as the voice of the computer (with Auto-Tune) on "Deeper Understanding." On "RubberBand Girl," Bush pays homage to the Rolling Stones' opening riff from "Street Fighting Man" in all its garagey glory (which one suspects was always there and has now been uncovered). The experience of The Director's Cut, encountering all this familiar material in its new dressing, is more than occasionally unsettling, but simultaneously, it is deeply engaging and satisfying” – AllMusic
7. Oh England My Lionheart - Lionheart
Album Release Date: 13th November, 1978
Producer: Andrew Powell (assisted by Kate Bush)
Label: EMI
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/kate-bush/lionheart-60077c9a-5fb5-4714-821a-280d80024a96
Review:
“Proving that the English admired Kate Bush's work, 1978's Lionheart album managed to reach the number six spot in her homeland while failing to make a substantial impact in North America. The single "Hammer Horror" went to number 44 on the U.K. singles chart, but the remaining tracks from the album spin, leap, and pirouette with Bush's vocal dramatics, most of them dissipating into a mist rather than hovering around long enough to be memorable. Her fairytale essence wraps itself around tracks like "In Search of Peter Pan," "Kashka From Baghdad," and "Oh England My Lionheart," but unravels before any substance can be heard. "Wow" does the best job at expressing her voice as it waves and flutters through the chorus, with a melody that shimmers in a peculiar but compatible manner. Some of the tracks, such as "Coffee Homeground" or "In the Warm Room," bask in their own subtle obscurity, a trait that Bush improved upon later in her career but couldn't secure on this album. Lionheart acts as a gauge more than a complete album, as Bush is trying to see how many different ways she can sound vocally colorful, even enigmatic, rather than focus on her material's content and fluidity. Hearing Lionheart after listening to Never for Ever or The Dreaming album, it's apparent how quickly Bush had progressed both vocally and in her writing in such a short time” – AllMusic
6. Mrs. Bartolozzi – Aerial
Album Release Date: 7th November, 2005
Producer: Kate Bush
Label: EMI
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/kate-bush/aerial-90730658-35e2-49ab-93d8-9c3e7897c0f4
Review:
“In the gap since 1993's so-so The Red Shoes, the Kate Bush myth that began fomenting when she first appeared on Top of the Pops, waving her arms and shrilly announcing that Cath-ee had come home-uh, grew to quite staggering proportions. She was variously reported to have gone bonkers, become a recluse and offered her record company some home-made biscuits instead of a new album. In reality, she seems to have been doing nothing more peculiar than bringing up a son, moving house and watching while people made up nutty stories about her.
Aerial contains a song called How to Be Invisible. It features a spell for a chorus, precisely what you would expect from the batty Kate Bush of popular myth. The spell, however, gently mocks her more obsessive fans while espousing a life of domestic contentment: "Hem of anorak, stem of wallflower, hair of doormat."
Domestic contentment runs through Aerial's 90-minute duration. Recent Bush albums have been filled with songs in which the extraordinary happened: people snogged Hitler, or were arrested for building machines that controlled the weather. Aerial, however, is packed with songs that make commonplace events sound extraordinary. It calls upon Renaissance musicians to serenade her son. Viols are bowed, arcane stringed instruments plucked, Bush sings beatifically of smiles and kisses and "luvv-er-ly Bertie". You can't help feeling that this song is going to cause a lot of door slamming and shouts of "oh-God-mum-you're-so-embarrassing" when Bertie reaches the less luvv-er-ly age of 15, but it's still delightful.
The second CD is devoted to a concept piece called A Sky of Honey in which virtually nothing happens, albeit very beautifully, with delicious string arrangements, hymnal piano chords, joyous choruses and bursts of flamenco guitar: the sun comes up, birds sing, Bush watches a pavement artist at work, it rains, Bush has a moonlight swim and watches the sun come up again. The pavement artist is played by Rolf Harris. This casting demonstrates Bush's admirable disregard for accepted notions of cool, but it's tough on anyone who grew up watching him daubing away on Rolf's Cartoon Club. "A little bit lighter there, maybe with some accents," he mutters. You keep expecting him to ask if you can guess what it is yet.
Domestic contentment even gets into the staple Bush topic of sex. Ever since her debut, The Kick Inside, with its lyrics about incest and "sticky love", Bush has given good filth: striking, often disturbing songs that, excitingly, suggest a wildly inventive approach to having it off. Here, on the lovely and moving piano ballad Mrs Bartolozzi, she turns watching a washing machine into a thing of quivering erotic wonder. "My blouse wrapping around your trousers," she sings. "Oh, and the waves are going out/ my skirt floating up around my waist." Laundry day in the Bush household must be an absolute hoot” – The Guardian
5. Leave It Open – The Dreaming
Album Release Date: 13th September, 1982
Producer: Kate Bush
Label: EMI
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/kate-bush/the-dreaming-03e10ee0-e2d3-4b54-948e-0afcb7e7c290
Review:
“In her borrowing further afield, her characters are less accurately rendered. This has been an unabashedly true part of Bush’s artistic imagination since The Kick Inside’s cover art, vaguely to downright problematic in its attempts to inhabit the worlds of Others. On “Pull Out the Pin” she uses the silver bullet as a totem of one’s protection against an enemy of supernatural evil. In this case, the hero is a Viet Cong fighter pausing before blowing up American soldiers who have no moral logic for their service. She’d watched a documentary that mentioned fighters put a silver Buddha into their mouths as they detonated a grenade, and in that she saw a dark mirror to key on the album cover. While the humanizing of such warriors in pop narrative is a brave act, it’s also possible to hear her thin arpeggiated synth percussion and outro cricket sounds as a part of an aural Orientalism that undermines that very attempt.
Then there’s “The Dreaming,” a parable of a real, historical, and contemporary group of Aboriginal people as timeless, noble savages in a tragically ruined Eden that lectures the center of empire about their (our) political and environmental violence. Bush narrates in a grotesquely exaggerated Australian accent over a thicket of exotic animal sounds, both holdovers from music hall and vaudeville’s racist “ethnic humor” tradition, a kind of distancing that suggests that settler Australians are somehow less civilized and thus more responsible for their white supremacist beliefs than the Empire that shipped them there in the first place. In telling this story in this way—without accurate depictions of people, and without credit, understanding, monetary remuneration, proper cultural context, or employment of indigenous musicians—she unfairly extracts cultural (and economic) value from Aboriginal suffering just as the characters in the song mine their land. As a rich text to meditate on colonial, racial, and sexual violence, it is actually quite useful—but not in the way Bush intended.
The closer “Get Out of My House” was inspired by two different maternal and isolation-madness horror texts: The Shining and Alien. In all three stories, a malevolent spirit wants to control a vessel. Bush does not let the spirit in, shouts “Get out!” and when it violates her demand, she becomes animal. Such shapeshifting is a master trope in Kate Bush’s songbook, an enduring way for her music and performance to blend elements of non-Western spirituality and European myth, turning mundane moments into Gothic horror. It’s also, unfortunately, the way that women without power can imagine escape. The mule who brays through the track’s end is a kind of female Houdini—a sorceress who can will her way out of violence not with language, but with real magic. At least it works in the world of her songs, a kingdom where queerly feminine excess is not policed, but nurtured into excellence” – Pitchfork
4. Lily – The Red Shoes
Album Release Date: 2nd November, 1993
Producer: Kate Bush
Label: EMI
Review:
“The album’s musical unwieldiness is set against Bush’s relatively diaristic songwriting.The Red Shoes is the most confessional album by an artist not known for, or especially interested in, confession. Bush has always taken advantage of the elusive space between art and reality, conjuring characters, rarely doing interviews, always aware of getting burned by a lingering spotlight. “That’s what all art’s about—a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can’t, in real life,” she said around the time of The Red Shoes. “It’s all make believe, really.” The album falters when she falls short of this magical realism. When it comes to her songwriting, Kate Bush’s stories are almost always more engrossing than Kate Bush.
The record’s personal themes of loss, perseverance, and memory coalesce on “Moments of Pleasure,” one of Bush’s most affecting ballads. She sings of the small memories of life—laughing at dumb jokes, snowy evenings high above New York City, a piece of wisdom from her mother—as Oscar-nominated composer Michael Kamen builds these quiet moments into monuments with a heroic string arrangement. Bush ends the song with a series of mini eulogies: for her aunt, her longtime guitarist, her dance partner. “Just being alive, it can really hurt,” she belts at the center of the track, stating the obvious with such conviction that it sounds revelatory” – Pitchfork
3. Cloudbusting – Hounds of Love
Album Release Date: 16th September, 1985
Producer: Kate Bush
Label: EMI
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/kate-bush/hounds-of-love-d3743f1e-51e3-4337-b759-f47b26c0a247/lp
Review:
“Kate at the young age of 22 had already recorded four albums with Hounds of Love being the follow up to her 1982 release The Dreaming. The Dreaming was the first time Bush had been in complete control in the sound booth as a producer. The success of her debut album The Kick Inside won her significant creative independence and patience from her record label a rarity in this period of popular music. From the beginning of her career, Kate was known as a renegade who did not play by the usual record industry rules.
A topic that is not often discussed when looking at Kate’s accomplishments was her ability to create a way to use the corrupting music label industry for her own devices. That skill alone is enough to make her a legend. Her musical abilities and risk-taking in her music make her a trailblazer. Very early in her fledgeling career, she realized the importance of artistic control. She set up her own publishing company and management after her disappointment in her treatment by the marketing at EMI and additionally being rushed by the label to record Lionheart. She always felt that Lionheart had not turned out as good as she would have liked. Her success on the charts would enable her to demand more time to record and enable her to release music only when it met her high standards.
In 1978 Kate was all of 19 when she topped the UK charts with Wuthering Heights off of The Kick Inside becoming the first female to achieve a UK #1 with a self-written song. As she moved through her various releases she looked to pushing the envelope and attaining artistic perfection. She quickly became know for her amazing vocal range, exquisite stylings and need to control and make perfect all her recording efforts. EMI was relatively undemanding about Kate’s work and level of success until the aftermath of The Dreaming. The Dreaming was ambitiously unlike Kate’s prior works and did not have a recognizable hit single. The album did not perform commercially as well as her prior efforts and the label put pressure on Bush to knock the next release out of the park. It was not for lack of effort that The Dreaming failed to find an audience; unfortunately, the surreal sonics and themes did not make for easy listening. Bush was exhausted after touring for The Dreaming. She decided after three years of unrelenting work to take a break. With the decision, she found her self in unmoored territory and was confused and disoriented by not to have do promotional work or perform studio duties. She also experienced writer's block for a period of about five months. Bush described this period as such, “It’s very difficult when you’ve been working for years doing one album after another. You need fresh things to simulate you. That’s why I decided to take a bit of the summer off and spend time with my boyfriend and with family and friends, just relaxing. Nor being Kate Bush the singer, just being myself.” In the summer of 83, she built a 48 track studio in the barn behind her newly purchased farmhouse. This event energized and inspired Bush to begin what would become Hounds of Love.
In January of 1984 Kate in her home studio at Wickham farm, Welling, England she began recording demos and enhancing them rather than re-recording them. Five months into the work she began overdubbing and mixing the album. The entire process took a year. Musically the album would be a marriage of traditional world instruments and utterly futuristic machinery, particularly the Fairlight synthesizer, which was the 80’s version of today’s Pro Tools. Always looking to expand her sonic palette she utilized everything out there that was available and a few things only she seemed to know existed. In the studio, Kate performed alchemy blending literary influences and a definite storyline especially on side two of the album. Throughout “Hounds of Love” would be loaded with Kate’s trademark melodramatic emotionalism and surreal musicality. The result was not only a winning release but a masterwork. “Hounds of Love” would be Bush’s 2nd chart-topper in the UK and her best selling studio album to date. It would go double platinum and by 1998 sell 1.1 million worldwide and actually make it across the pond reaching the top 40 on the Billboard 200. The singles are all taken from the first side of the album and were; Running up that Hill, Cloudbursting, Hounds of Love and The Big Sky. It was the great success that Kate achieved that finally brought her to the attention of a larger American audience. As per usual American exposure to a seminal British artist was a day late and a dollar short but led to a significant following of dedicated new fans on the US side of the pond.
There is an inherent dichotomy to “Hounds of Love” and it has a definite split personality. Kate fully utilized the format of two sides on a recording. The first side is the most approachable yet contains numerous deep and esoteric themes. That side presented everything anyone familiar with Kate’s prior work had come to expect. It examined many Freudian themes, the relationships of parents and their children, anxiety, Eros, ecstasy and nature. Throughout there is a total emotional commitment from Bush that is physically palpable. The second side would be more ambitious and more difficult for the indifferent less adventurous listener to grasp. The second side or as it is titled, The Ninth Wave is beyond almost anything attempted at the time. It was a concept album to the nth degree, cohesive and evocative as it dealt with death and the unimaginable. Where the first side was life and Eros The Ninth Wave is Thanatos and facing imminent death; the loss of control. The Ninth Wave is extraordinary, mystic and ultimately epic” – XS Noise
2. Wuthering Heights – The Kick Inside
Album Release Date: 17th February, 1978
Producer: Andrew Powell
Labels: EMI (U.S.)/Harvest (U.S.)
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/kate-bush/the-kick-inside-7a5278e6-76b3-40e7-a55f-2d9471a311ae/lp
Review:
“In the beginning she was seen as a prodigy, not an enigma, but this would change as she gradually faded from view. The touring stopped first, the interviews became less frequent and less revealing; eventually, after 1993, she dropped out of sight altogether, only reconnecting with the world unexpectedly, at great intervals.
We are currently experiencing a minor reconnection. There is no new album, or live show, but there is, How to Be Invisible, a book of her lyrics, plus her albums remastered and reissued as three boxed sets.
Part of me frets this ordering of her legacy might be a coded retirement – would she do this if a new record was underway? The less tinfoil hat bit of me notes she has always tinkered with her back catalogue, and that there’s probably no higher meaning beyond some fairly typical pre-Christmas action from a heritage artist.
Anyway, whether by accident or design, Volume One binds the leotard years up as a distinct phase. The Kick Inside, (1978), released when she was just 19, and The Dreaming (1982), which came out when she was 24, are vastly different records, but they were marked by a relatively cohesive aesthetic that she’d largely leave behind afterwards
I am banging on about leotards because again, it’s much easier to stick to mundane facts than actually explain Kate Bush. And ‘Wuthering Heights’, her debut single, most famous song, and sole number one, sounds borderline comical if you stick to the mundane facts.
You can call it a musical adaptation of Emily Brontë's sole novel, but is that really why it works? It’s easier to laugh it off as an eccentric endeavour than really interrogate its power, than admit the way she sings the word "window" is genuinely astonishing, than contemplate the fact she’s somehow drilled her way into deeper emotional chambers simply inaccessible by most artists. I think maybe the key to ‘Wuthering Heights’ - and most of her music - is that it goes too far: the voice, the dance, the subject matter; anybody else would have stopped way before; it’s Wagnerian in scale and intensity, only tangentially bound to the mortal form of a pop song. It’s beyond most artists’ imaginations to write this sort of stuff, and I think it’s beyond most writers’ imaginations to write about this sort of stuff.
I am absolutely including myself in that, btw. But her PR has sent me these lovely vinyls and I guess I need to pass critical comment, so here we are, maybe let’s not drag this out.
One funny thing about The Kick Inside is that from the atmospheric bleed in of ‘Moving’, it sounds like a Kate Bush-produced album - which of course it isn’t, the little-known Andrew Powell doing the honours.. There is a maturity to the songwriting that is matched by the musicianship: it doesn’t feel like there’s any attempt to patronise the teenager, or market her as such. I think it must have been a pretty extraordinary record to hear at the time. Peculiarly, though, The Kick Inside is almost dated by the strength of its fundamentals: in some respects it sounds like a less good version of what she’d do later, and I wonder if a less slick version of her debut might have stood up a bit better, historically. But detail and polish were always her thing, in a good way, and to say she'd bottled nothing of her youth would be wrong: both ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘The Man with the Child In His Eyes’ have a gorgeous gaucheness. At the end of the day it still just about nudges classic status, but it would be eclipsed soon enough (plus sue me but the ’86 ‘Wuthering Heights’ is way better) (8)” – Drowned in Sound
1. Lake Tahoe – 50 Words for Snow
Album Release Date: 21st November, 2011
Producer: Kate Bush
Label: Fish People
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=386159&ev=mb
Review:
“Six years after Aerial’s bursts of summer sound, Kate Bush’s winter album arrives, each track exploring the long Christmas months. They reflect a season which brings out the profound and absurd in equal measure – the feelings of longing and loneliness that emerge as the dark nights bed in, the party-hat silliness that pops up when the same nights stretch out. 50 Words for Snow initially aims for the former value, with Bush’s son Bertie taking the opening vocal on Snowflake. "I was born in a cloud," he sings eerily, like the ghost of Little Lord Fauntleroy; he is constantly falling, all "ice and dust and light". His mother keeps appearing – he sees her "long white neck" – promising to find him, but we don’t find out if she does. On paper, it’s a lovely concept. On record, it treads an exceedingly fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous.
But this is classic Kate. On 1993’s The Red Shoes, Prince had to play second fiddle to Lenny Henry on Why Should I Love You?; on Aerial, Rolf Harris performed on two songs. But Bush has always been almost wilfully uncool, and this time around is no different. Take Stephen Fry taking the lead on the title-track, whispering fifty synonyms for the white stuff, from the lovely "blown from polar fur" to the frankly daft "phlegm de neige". It sounds embarrassingly cold, perhaps because of his ubiquity – if only Vincent Price was still alive, or Ian McKellen was available. Another guest, Elton John, fares much better on Snowed in at Wheeler Street, partly because his voice takes on a gentler quality than usual, partly because the song maps the movements of lost love very beautifully, and partly because John was Bush’s first hero; you can hear this depth of feeling as their voices mesh together.
The album only really reaches the heights Bush has set for herself when she appears centre stage. Her voice is noticeably older now, full of earth, heft and husk, and works stunningly well with little more than her piano’s sustain pedal – especially in Misty, her already widely-commented-upon love song for a snowman. Giving Raymond Briggs’ famous concept an X-rated twist – he is "melting in my hand", the next morning "the sheets are soaking" – its 13 minutes are spellbinding. The album’s finale, Among Angels, is even better, a torch-song for a friend in need, with a stunning central lyric: "I can see angels standing around you / They shimmer like mirrors in summer / But you don’t know it." Throughout, the piano sets a magical mood, all dark, loud and heavy.
Just after the song’s start, you also hear Bush stop for a second, take her fingers off the keys, and whisper the word "fine". In Lake Tahoe, the song also breaks suddenly at 8.44, leaving Bush to exhale one sharp, startling breath. 50 Words for Snow may threaten to lose its way in the blizzard sometimes, but it is moments like these – jolting us from her world for a moment, reminding us of how all-embracing her talent can be – that show just how much she can move us with her fire and ice” – BBC