What is Christmas for, exactly? For me, it’s a time of reflection and of sudden dawning realisation. Reflection on the year’s new music, and the sudden dawning realisation that I have hardly heard any of it. Not that I think it matters. Newness isn’t everything, or even very much, and there’s no reason why anyone should feel obliged to keep up with all the new releases, which is almost a job in itself. Far easier to let the songs worth hearing shake themselves free from the vast knobbly mass of tripe, drivel, Coldplay comebacks and Noel Gallagher solo albums. The good stuff will always find your ears in the end.
Nonetheless, this December I found myself reading all those ‘Best Records of the Year’ features and, not for the first time, feeling a little left behind. It’s all too easy to distract yourself with records of the past, only to find that records of the present have already become records of the past. So I made sure that, at the very least, I would get the new Kate Bush album for Christmas. It’s just 33 years since I last got a Kate Bush album for Christmas (Lionheart). Past and present thus collide, causing only minor injuries. Like most middle-aged men, I like to think I have improved with the decades, but Kate Bush genuinely has.
As it happens, this was her second new record of the year. Director’s Cut was a mopped-up, decluttered rejig of songs from her 1989 and 1993 albums, The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. I haven’t heard it yet, possibly because I never much liked either of those albums, which were utterly of their time with their horrible, overegged electronic production. But then it’s reasonable to assume that Bush didn’t like them much either, even at the time, for after them she didn’t record again for 12 years.
Aerial (2005) was quieter, bolder, richer and more concerned with texture than previous recordings: it’s an album born of confident middle age. There’s a wonderful scope to it: some songs sound like attempts to make music out of vista. You’re outside when listening to this record, peering towards a distant horizon. 50 Words For Snow (Fish People), by contrast, feels dark and wintry, wrapped up against the cold, or warming itself in front of a blazing log fire.
Kate Bush doesn’t make music out of nothing: she has an idea and then finds a way to represent it musically. So ‘Wild Man’, a song about a yeti, has weird, fluting chorus vocals from Andy Fairweather Low, and makes you feel as though you are lost on a snowy mountain in Tibet, possibly without your gloves. ‘Misty’ may or may not be about a woman having sexual relations with a snowman, but if it is, we know that only Kate Bush could get away with it. These seven tracks will take up 65 minutes of your time: there are no hit singles here, nor anything that makes the faintest gesture towards mainstream pop values. On four of the seven tracks there are really only piano and vocals, with a little brushed percussion, courtesy of US session maestro Steve Gadd, and guitar and bass so far back in the mix they might as well not be there at all.
Do I like it? After half a dozen hearings I’m not sure, but I’m still listening. This new music of Bush’s demands patience, as well as the respect she receives as a matter of course. Now I begin to understand the reviews, which were universally admiring but strangely low on enthusiasm. For rock’n’roll has left this particular building. She is wandering off into the cold and dark, and it will be fascinating to see how many of her audience she takes with her.
But how much is this music of now? On the face of it, hardly at all. Kate Bush is prog to her toenails. This is early Pink Floyd, via Roy Harper and late, mad Talk Talk, with a flavour of Rickie Lee Jones’s glorious second album, Pirates. There’s hardly anything here that couldn’t have been done in the mid-1970s. But it’s what she wants to do. Very little new music, one gets the feeling, is what they want to do, other than Noel Gallagher’s solo album, but then he can’t do anything else. It’s the complete artistic freedom of 50 Words For Snow that is so bracing. Happy new year, and wrap up well.
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