Send "Kate Bush " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 On "Wild Man", the first single from Kate Bush's winterized 10th album, the singer tells of an expedition searching for the elusive Abominable Snowman. "They want to know you," she coos, "They will hunt you down, then they will kill you/ Run away, run away, run away." Of course, when it comes to modern popular figures-- who often court fame and adulation with an obsessiveness that can be fascinating or just plain sad-- Bush herself is something of a mythical beast. 50 Words for Snow is only her second album of original material in the last 17 years, and she hasn't performed a full concert since her groundbreaking and theatrical Tour of Life wrapped up its six-week run in 1979. So it's no surprise that she readily sympathizes with the misunderstood monster at the center of "Wild Man": "Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside/ You sound lonely."50 Words for Snow is teeming with classic Bush-ian characterizations and stories-- fantasies, personifications, ghosts, mysteries, angels, immortals. As quoted in Graeme Thompson's thorough, thoughtful recent biography Under the Ivy, she explained her attraction to such songwriting: "[Songs] are just like a little story: you are in a situation, you are this character. This is what happens. End. That's what human beings want desperately. We all love being read stories, and none of us get it anymore." She's onto something; in our postmodern era, the idea of a tale can seem quaint and simple. But Bush continues to infuse her narratives with a beguiling complexity while retaining some old-school directness. Because while most of this album's songs can be easily summarized-- "Snowflake" chronicles the journey of a piece of snow falling to the ground; "Lake Tahoe" tells of a watery spirit searching for her dog; "Misty" is the one about the woman who sleeps with a lusty snowman (!)-- they contain wondrous multitudes thanks to the singer's still-expressive voice and knack for uncanny arrangements. And mood. There's an appealing creepiness that runs through this album, one that recalls the atmospheric and conceptual back half of her 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love. Indeed, when considering this singular artist in 2011, it's difficult to think of worthy points of reference aside from Bush herself; her onetime art-rock compatriots David Bowie and Peter Gabriel are currently MIA and in rehash mode, respectively. And while current acts including Florence and the Machine are heavily inspired by Bush's early career and spiritual preoccupations, none are quite able to match their idol's particular brand of heart-on-sleeve mysticism. In an interview earlier this year, the 53-year-old Bush told me she doesn't listen to much new music, and after listening to the stunningly subtle and understated sounds on Snow, it's easy to believe her....full text |
| Bbc |
| 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....full text |
| Guardian |
| There are many peculiar things about Kate Bush's 50 Words for Snow. If it's not strictly speaking a Christmas album, it's certainly a seasonal one, and the seasonal album is these days more associated with Justin Bieber than critically acclaimed singer-songwriters following their own wildly idiosyncratic path. It devotes nearly 14 impossibly beautiful minutes to Misty, a song on which Bush imagines first building a snowman and then, well, humping him, with predictably unhappy consequences: "He is dissolving before me," she sings sadly, not the first lady in history to complain about an evening of passion coming to a premature conclusion. It features a title track that turns out to be more prosaically named than you might expect. Over pattering drums and an almost acid house synth line, Stephen Fry (perhaps possessed by the spirit of his hero Vivian Stanshall's cameo appearance on Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells) enunciates 50 largely made-up synonyms for snow with fruity relish, while Bush offers encouragement from the sidelines: "Come on, man, you've got 44 to go." The first words are beautiful, but become increasingly Pythonesque – you go from blackbird braille and Wenceslas air to schnamistaflopf and boomerangablanga. And, on Wild Man – on which Bush sings about the Yeti in a voice that suggests she'd definitely consider giving him a seeing-to as well – we find Andy Fairweather Low pretending to be a Nepalese mountain dweller: "While crossing the Lhapka-La, something jumped down from the rocks," sings the veteran sessioneer....full text |
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