The project is divided into two suites: Side One, Hounds of Love, and Side Two, The Ninth Wave.
Bush opts for the offbeat while maintaining the serious responsibility of storytelling, a quality central to the narrative structure of the album. The cinematic prowess of Bush can best be portrayed in the accompanying visuals of the album: a confetti-haired woman waltzing with her lover, a couple in synchronized harmony bathed in moonlight, even Donald Sutherland maniacally manufacturing a cloudbuster machine. Meshing the new tech with oddball traditional instrumentals such as the didgeridoo, the bouzouki lute, and uilleann bagpipes, Bush leaned into her curious sensibilities to pioneer a new kind of pop, both lyrically and sonically - one that valued artful experimentation over redundancy. She built a 48-track studio in her family barn and created Hounds of Love within a year, taking a rather abnormal approach to the standard hitmaker use of the synthesizer. So, in 1984, Bush fled London alongside her partner and bassist Del Palmer, opting to spend the summer in a quaint farmhouse away from the public eye. I think, in a way, that’s what I’ve been waiting for.”
In a 1982 discussion with Electronic Music Maker, Bush said her attraction to the Fairlight was bent on “its ability to create very human, animal, emotional sounds that don’t actually sound like a machine. While critics found her first creation with the computer too radical for commercial success, the songstress continued her experimentation into her fifth album. The artist’s experimental fourth album saw her dabbling with the new and complex digital Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer, a notoriously “arty” contraption used by the likes of Peter Gabriel and Thomas Dolby in attempts to usher in a new age of techno-pop production. Bush summons the powers of modern technology, traditional Irish instrumentals, and her shockingly protean vocal register to sing epic tales of guilt, grief, and God.īush created Hounds of Love following the muddled reception of her first entirely self-produced record, 1982’s The Dreaming. Though subject to early criticism for her showiness or assumed performativity, Bush wore her femininity as a kind of armor - and with her fifth album Hounds of Love, she reaches her emotional and compositional peak. Only when the dismal post punk of the mid-’70s (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division) melted into the zealous overproduction of the next decade did critics begin to take notice of the British wunderkind, who was producing singles infectious enough for radio hits, but campy enough to trailblaze prog rock. Bush embraced lyrical themes of gender equality and sexual liberation in the unforgivably masculine early ’80s, and her imaginative ideation of femininity remains an influence on various modern pop acts today.īut Bush’s deity status didn’t come instantly. The lovingly dubbed Patron Saint of Alternative Pop has become a defining voice for experimentation in a sonic playscape of predictability.
At the precipice of a bizarre lucid dream stands the inimitable Kate Bush, eyes wide, hands outstretched, ready to take you down the holy winding paths only she knows about.
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