Released in 1982 - the same year as Kate Bush's landmark album The Dreaming was issued - Nina Hagen's Nunsexmonkrock is probably best described as the crazy German cousin of that Bush offering. It is a widely epic statement that uses genres as its personal bitch, executed by an artist with a stunning, non-traditional vocal range that bounces between terror and beauty in seconds.
And it starts that way with the very first song, "Antiworld," featuring tribal drums beats and Middle Eastern tones, all while Hagen bounces off reverberated versions of herself-each one a demonic and terrifying force. Compared to The Dreaming's opener "Sat In Your Lap," Hagen gets the nod for straight up intimidation. It's unlike anything you've ever heard, and it's the first song on the fucking album.
Cut two "Smack Jack" begins with polite early 80's rhythms and it sucks you into its familiar spaces of synthesizers and cleanly strummed guitars. All good until Hagen begins singing like an elderly Eastern European Jewish grandmother with throat cancer and possessed by the devil. She howls underneath in another overdubbed voice and by the chorus she speeds up the tempo to a gallop and begins screaming "Shoot it up, smack jack!" It's incredible drama, and even Hagen agrees with yet another voice appearing from the corners with the observation, "Junkies...are very sentimental."
"Taitschi-Tarot" channels Yoko Ono excercises quite nicely as thoughts on reincarnation. It leads into Hagen's tip-toes into the heavy metal arena with wails that are an octive higher than Maiden's Bruce Dickenson and run right next to an opera Hagen that's dubbed on top of the whole mess.
By the end of Nunsexmonkrock, we've been professionally introduced to her infant daughter Cosma Shiva Hagen, an array of childlike voices, an eerie male demon, and five minutes on the subject of UFOs ("You are not alone!! Remember, it's true!!") underneath a mechanical syncopated beat.
Yes, Nunsexmonkrock can be an overwhelming barrage of voices, noises, and genres all lobbed together in a package that questions both Hagen's sanity and her own place in the world of recorded music. Because, quite honestly, the only other person I can think of who's accomplished this level of uncompromising music has a last name of Beefheart or Ubu. Shouldn't we be placing Hagen in the same breath? Nunsexmonkrock makes a great case that we should.
"1968 is over!" Hagen reminds us, before screaming "Future is Now!" and some thirty years later, it still hasn't arrived, even when the spaceshit can be found right in the grooves of this warped masterpiece.
During my formative dating years, there became a point within the relationship where I would introduce the young woman to the other love of my life: Kate Bush.
It could be a very daunting moment because, admittedly, Kate is an acquired taste, and she sometimes wasn't received with the same amount of enthusiasm as I possessed. From this point, depending on the reaction, a few ladies were taken farther into this woman's work. These ended up becoming weirdly significant in terms of how deeply I felt about the person in the relationship. To love Kate was to love a part of me, I suppose, and if they could somehow see the brilliance of Kate then they could somehow relate to me better.
And they always understood that I would leave them at a moment's notice if Kate ever called up to propose.
Midwestern Top 40 radio (yes, the region makes a difference) was an unexciting mix of uninspired hits and Wonder bread melodies. Sometimes you would hear a track bubbling under the Top 20 songs, but these spins were restricted to evenings and overnights. There was very little space provided to chance and anything deemed too "urban" for these stations was avoided like the plague.
Bush managed to crack the U.S. Top 40 with "Running Up That Hill," a song that did ease its way into the area radio stations before quickly retreating once again. A few girlfriends vaguely remembered the track, but admittedly, this song was somewhat of an anomaly compared to her album tracks.
Moving backward reveals a weirder muse working with Bush, and those earlier records also add a touch of youthful flamboyance. It's in full view on the Live At Hammersmith Odeon concert, a video released in the early 80's that remains as the only recorded document of her 1979 Tour Of Life shows. For a few "lucky" ladies, I would whip out a shitty vhs dubbed copy of this performance and wax on and on about how great of an artist Kate was.
The Tour Of Life is getting a lot of attention lately, thanks to the huge news that Bush would be returning to the stage this Fall in a 15 date tour being called Before The Dawn. Trouble is: these 15 dates are in London, as the reclusive Bush is reportedly not a fan of flying, making the idea of a world tour highly unlikely.
So if you want to get a pair of tickets for the shows, you're left with this option: try to find them at one of the four dates in August or any one of the dates until September 19th at a venue in London that only holds about 3,600. The servers to Kate's website crash when news of these new live dates went public, so I would imagine that these 3,600 x 15 seats will go insanely fast. Edit: They sold out within 15 minutes. They've now added 7 additional dates to the initial 15, but those have also sold out.
This proves to be an issue for a fan like me, from Iowa, and without suitable resources that I can drop everything this September and fly over to London to catch a show, never mind the near impossibility that I could even get a ticket to begin with.
The murmurs about Kate's return to the stage began a few years ago. It was believable to the point where I could actually see how the current state of the music industry may the idea of Bush performing again a reality. I'm guessing that her semi-retirement and loonnnggg stretches in between records was funded by consistent record sales, sales that have all but shriveled up.
While I certainly don't expect Ms. Bush to divulge her bank ledger to the world, I can't help but wonder if this entire project is financially motivated. But whatever. In the end it's prompting Kate to work in a medium that hinted at enormous potential the last time she graced the stage.
Which begs the question: Why did she leave the stage after her promising debut?
The rumor was the death of a young lighting crew member during one of the tour dates caused her to avoid live performances, but there was very little supporting this theory.
In 2011, she cited "exhaustion" to The Telegram, which if you've seen the Hammersmith-Odeon video, you can clearly understand how plausible the explanation is. There are numerous costume changes, ridiculously theatrical choreography, and a sprite Kate utilizing a microphone headset while running around the entire stage for a solid 90 minutes. It's both hard to watch and hard to look away from, but when you consider it's the warped vision of a 20 year old woman and compare it to the hyper-sexual theatrics of a Miley Cyrus concert, you tend to appreciate it more. Kate is clearly working from a more advanced inspiration during these shows.
Ironically, the attempt to promote or report on the sexuality of her performances was another reason Kate walked away from live performances. Her early records are filled with songs of sex, lust, menstruation and pregnancy-all very striking statements from someone just barely of age. The live performances don't exactly exploit these topics as they do visualize them, and more recently she's cited the uncomfortable feeling she had with that focus on her sexuality as another reason she's isolated herself in the studio ever since.
Looking at the output she's provided since that tour from 1979, I'm fine with that decision. But I'm also hugely intrigued at her return to the stage and hope that it's not a retirement set. I'm also hoping that the reports of her fear of flying don't prevent her from coming to America at some point, but I'm realistic and understand that this will probably never happen.
I've already begun to formula a dream set list for the London dates, but even the title Before The Dawn seems to indicate there's something special afoot. Of course, that's always been the case with Kate. And if I ever want to be reminded of that, I can always return to the color-saturated video of the Tour Of Life that still resides in the few vhs tapes that have made it this far.
I couldn't let it go.
Unlike all those former girlfriends who were treated to a showing of this flawed relic, I'm still true to my first love.
For those too young to remember, Saturday Night Live was hugely influential in breaking new artists before MTV. I remember learning about Devo, the B-52′s, Fear, and many others from the show. And on one episode that featured Monty Python member Eric Idle as the guest host, a young Kate Bush was the musical guest. She writhed on top of a piano if I recall, sang “The Man With The Child In His Eyes” and I immediately fell in love with her.
There was something precious about her first two albums and a hint of some remarkable talent on album number three, Never Forever. But it wasn’t until the fourth album, The Dreaming, that Kate Bush’s capacities began to be fully realized.
It was here that Bush began to assume more diverse characters in her songs, often utilizing the full range of her voice for dramatic effect. She also began to piece all of the musical elements together as the record’s sole producer. As one would expect from a relative novice in the producer’s chair, there are moments of clutter and questionable arrangements.
But for every misstep, there is a sense that Bush set out to make The Dreaming as something more than she, or any other contemporary artist, had made before. For that lofty goal, she must be duly rewarded, but the real reward may be how she was able to go so far towards the avant-garde and recover in better shape commercially than before. There is little on The Dreaming that sounds commercially accessible, and the fact that her record company gave her even more financial resources for her next album seems unfathomable in today’s economic climate.
What’s more is that The Dreaming shows signs of Kate Bush being completely bat-shit crazy. Sure, she was able to maintain a proper English front in the press and fans, but it’s not far fetched to consider her fodder for the loony bin after a few spins of this record. As a matter of fact, there are shots of her donning a straightjacket in the video for “Suspended In Gaffa.”
Video storyboards aside, all interviews from this period and beyond show an impossibly coherent and well-spoken person, seemingly leaving all normalcies at the studio door during the recording process. She addresses this on “Leave It Open,” the last song on side one. “I kept it in a cage / Watched it weeping / But made it stay,” she says of her idiosyncrasies, before acknowledging “now I’ve started learning how…I leave it open.”
What exactly is she leaving open in The Dreaming? The door to “weirdness” apparently, judging from the last verse where she all but admits to the listener through backwards masking: “We let the weirdness in.”
It’s true: Kate assumes various personas throughout the album, an amateur robber (“There Goes A Tenner”), a Viet Cong soldier (“Pulling Out The Pin”), Harry Houdini’s wife (“Houdini”), and by the end of the album (“Get Out Of My House”) she’s lost her mind completely to the point where she begins to bray and snort like a fucking donkey.
If her lyrics and the roles she puts her voice through aren’t enough to make the proceedings challenging, the rest of the arrangements will challenge even the most well-versed of listeners.
She cakes all available tracks with worldly instruments, leaving only the spare piano/vocal movements for emotional impacts. They’re infrequent, which means that for the majority of the album you’re wading through Turkish string instruments, didjeridus, and maybe an occasional bullroarer.
It takes a while to get used to all of the continent jumping and ethnic polyrhythms, particularly since The Dreaming sounds far from what would be considered a “world music” album. No, the only sense of why certain instruments were used was if they marginally fit the song’s overall theme and if they sounded majorly fucked up.
By commercial standards, The Dreaming failed. Even in England, which treated her as a national treasure prior to the album’s release, only one single (“Sat In Your Lap”) managed to crack the top twenty. Why her label, after taking such a gamble, agreed to let Kate man the controls again for her next album is quite remarkable.
She repaid them by delivering an album that was slightly less challenging but still far-reaching; Hounds Of Love provided them/her with worldwide success and instantaneous notoriety. It too is an album worth pursuing, but for my money, I like The Dreaming more. It shows a young women, manic with ideas and creativity throwing caution to the wind and delivering an off-her-rocker masterpiece that very few artists have ever had the courage to make before or since.
Until recently, we’ve had a mild winter in the Midwest. There’s been very few days where temperatures fell below freezing and it was the first time in years when there wasn’t snow on the ground during Christmas.
It was a challenge not to buy Kate Bush’s new album 50 Words For Snow when it was released last November, but I had to wait. I knew that someone would probably place it under the Christmas tree as a gift for me, as it’s well known around these parts that my love for all things Kate is quite pronounced.
Indeed: when that morning came, I found two copies of the record from different sources.
How strange then that when the moment arrived to finally dive into it, I felt restrained. Within the first few chords of the opener “Snowflake,” I began to consider that I might not be drawn to it in the same way that I was with other Kate releases. That feeling continued when I heard the first voice of the record.
It wasn’t Kate, but her son Bertie.
I tucked away 50 Words For Snow for a few weeks, and then in mid January we received our first snowfall. Suddenly, the fields transformed from dead blacks and browns into mysterious white. The snow dampened the sounds outside to the point where you felt like you could be the only living thing for miles around. The crunch of my boots became a cacophony of rhythm while the cold, blowing wind through the trees became an orchestra of strings.
It was at that moment when I felt ready to give 50 Words For Snow another listen.
I’m not suggesting that there needs to be snow on the ground before you can appreciate Kate’s 10th record, but for me it provided the necessary motivation. Like those cold and silent evenings where the elements forces everyone inside, Kate has created an album of such minimalism that it can force listeners into their own isolation as the music does not bode well in social settings.
The intimacy requires your patience, and with time, you begin to notice the flourishes with every quiet pause, each piano chord, and every twisted tale.
Suddenly, Albert’s voice becomes as high as the snowflake that’s forming in the clouds, Steve Gadd’s drumming swings with the slow pace of footsteps on snow-covered sidewalks, and Kate’s voice-deeper with age-becomes the focal point of arrangements that go past the ten-minute mark with intense and precise intent.
With so much time on your hands, you begin to notice things. For example, you discover that one of the album’s highlights (“Misty”) is about a woman who melts a snowman during a night of lovemaking. The following track (“Wild Man”) seems to be about Bigfoot, and the title track finds Stephen Fry reciting things like “avalanche,” “shovel crusted” and “ankle breaker” from Kate’s own personal thesaurus for the word snow.
“Snowed In At Wheeler Street” features Kate’s idol Elton John as her duet partner, a love song complete with melodrama and Elton’s penchant for throwing his back into the delivery without providing any honest emotional weight. It’s the album’s lowest point, which is expected when you consider the melodramatic garbage that Elton’s been releasing for decades.
The closer “Among Angels” is another disappointment, mainly for how out of place it sounds. It carries the same piano arrangement as the rest of the album, but thematically it’s off course considering the lack of a wintery theme and from the fact that the aforementioned title track seems like such a perfect ending.
In some respects, 50 Words For Snow is just as strange as The Dreaming, albeit for entirely different reasons. While The Dreaming relied on weird arrangements and challenging lyrical content, Snow lets the deceivingly strange themes stand right out in front of some very organic structures.
It’s a record that will definitely stand the test of time and it may rank as one her best pieces of work for some fans. But for me, 50 Words For Snow works best when the season that inspired it contains the right amount of wintery details to perfectly accentuate its primitive arrangements.
After the forever and a day time it took to finally get Aerial, Kate Bush is seemingly back to her previous work load schedule of releasing an album every half-decade now. This must mean her son is now becoming either a bit more self-sufficient or perhaps a bit more irritating as children can often be.
Except this time, Mommy went back to the studio to rework some music that she’s already released before.
The music is restricted to The Sensual World and The Red Shoes-two efforts that I’m not exactly smitten with, particularly The Red Shoes. It seemed to be the last thing we would hear from Kate for a time, but then surprisingly the wonderful Aerial finally identified Shoes as “the mediocre record before Kate’s drought by childrearing.
The idea that Director’s Cut would merely be an album of “reworked” material-one where Kate uses much of the original material while re-doing the vocals and some minor instrumentation (mainly piano) was a bit unsettling.
What’s the point, really? And would Kate turn into the George Lucas of music, turning the material into a veritable Greedo by incorporating a fucking autotune voice during “Deeper Understanding.”
Shame on Kate?
Shame on me for doubting her!
Director’s Cut has turned the material into a more emotional event. Gone are the woefully dated drum and synthesizer sounds, a complaint that I heard from many non-Kate fans when trying to turn their attention to her material a quarter-century ago.
And those twenty-five years have deepened Kate’s voice, perfectly meshing with the more atmospheric approach that she began with Aerial. What this does is make the Red Shoes material seem more like they should have been when first released, an audio tribute to her late mother who passed shortly before Shoes was recorded.
With that deeper voice, the Red Shoes songs sound more human connective and with the scaled back instrumentation, the rest of the material sounds emotionally connective. It’s a remarkable feat, one that manages to eliminate almost every concern that you may have had going into the album.
The good news is that it also gets better with each listen.
I will admit that my favorite Red Shoes cut-“Top Of The City”-doesn’t take to the new arrangement as well as the original. And I will express disappointment that the worthless Eric Clapton solo on “And So Is Love” wasn’t admonished from the mix on the updated version.
But a pair of missteps aside, Director’s Cut not only exceeds my limited expectations, it nearly exceeds The Sensual World for me and it manages to redeem The Red Shoes, transforming it from a half-hearted effort before retirement into a nice rebound to what is turning out to be a fine second-wind from Ms. Bush.
My current obsession suddenly hit after watching the season/series finale of Extras. In case you’re wondering: the show, in similar fashion to the finale of The Office, was freakin’ brilliant. Season one was ok. Season two was much more awesomer. And the finale managed to turn Gervais into this asshole catch-phrase television star that’s completely forgotten the dismal origins of his career. In the process, he also forgets the one friend that’s stood by him throughout during a time where she really needs a helping hand or, at the very least, an understanding ally. That ally doesn’t come from Andy Millman. It came from a Kate Bush song, “This Woman’s Work.” It’s been years since I’d heard it, and the gentle reassurance from Bush’s voice fit perfectly as we see Maggie working dismal jobs just to afford to pay the rent on a one-room shitty apartment in a bad part of town. We see her giving up on acting and trading in her dreams for cleaning, washing dishes, and nearly begging for a position at a cell phone store run by Andy’s former manager. Throughout these scenes, we hear Kate tenderly offering “I know you have a little life in you yet,” that inner voice that says to keep going on. There are times when we need that little voice and, on occasion, there are times when only a song provides it. Of course, Gervais is something special and, without divulging too much, Andy Millman finally reaches an epiphany about his own priorities in his career and how he’s treated those that he now feels superior over. I’ll leave it to you to check out that powerful scene while I look forward to Ricky’s next televised accomplishment and while I bask in “This Woman’s Work” playing repeatedly in my head.
Don’t bother trying to label Kate Bush as one of the most important women in popular music, let’s suggest that her fifth album may be the most epic English record since Sgt. Pepper. And let’s also suggest that Hounds Of Love is a better album than Sgt. Pepper while we’re at it. Any comparison between Kate Bush and The Beatles may seem a little far fetched, but listen closely: it’s clear that Kate heard endless sonic possibilities in those old Beatle album and, well, she had a forty-eight track studio at her house, so why the hell not give it a try herself? Ironically, there is so much going on throughout Hounds Of Love that all of those over-reaching sounds, themes and arrangements are downright endearing. I can’t hear an ounce of pretension in this album, but I can hear a bunch of wide-eyed ideas going right to the edge of tackiness and stopping short of putting that last ornament on the lawn. Separated into two suites (only a true Kate Bush fan could identify them and explain the suite’s concept), she places the clear single choices on side one and the continually segueing material on the progressive-leaning side two. Lyrically, every song comes across as the CliffsNotes version of a larger read. And typically, Bush does a worthy job of promoting enough interest in the topic that, maybe for a moment, you actually want to pick up the original inspiration. “Cloudbusting” hints at Wilhelm Reich, “Running Up That Hill” hints of Sylvia, and the entire second side reeks of Tennyson. The twenty plus years have demonstrated two things: the first is how dated the production sounds and, second, how remarkable it is in every other measurable area. It’s true: the entire disc is marred in 80’s electric drum and, because every track is not spared, the bright and dark of the sonic landscape is whittled down to a muddy goo. At the same time, there should be no shame in being a product of an era’s poor production strategies; Hounds Of Love probably would have sounded muddled in any decade, bogged down by the weight of Kate’s intention.
Boy howdy! When I was in high school, I had a tremendous crush on Kate Bush. Seriously. I imagined that it was me instead of Houdini she was kissing on the cover of “The Dreaming.” Then I imagined that we would get married and I would tell her how wonderful her new material sounded when she played it for me in the music room of our castle in England. Things between Kate and I never worked out. She released “The Sensual World” and I got a little bored at how the album wasn’t as challenging as the previous two. Her next effort, “The Red Shoes,” was more of the same and even less inspired. Then Kate disappeared.
If you’re retardedly obsessed like me, you learned that she had a kid and was focusing her efforts on being a Mother. Last year, I learned that she was hanging around Abbey Road Studios which could only mean that a new Kate album was on the horizon. “Aerial” marks the first album from her in twelve years and possibly her best in twenty. With that being said, don’t expect it to be another “Dreaming” or “Hounds.” It couldn’t be and most certainly isn’t. Instead, we have another Bush album placed squarely in middle age and a reflection on domestic bliss. While that it itself isn’t adventurous by any stretch of the imagination, enough time has passed in between albums for her new effort to sound refreshing. The album, broken into two separate discs (“A Sea Of Honey” b/w “A Sky Of Honey”), begins with the single “King Of The Mountain,” an interesting study in Elvis. What’s even more interesting is how she’s finally thrown out the heavy handed production values that’s plagued the vast majority of her work in the past. Analog drums and effect-free guitars back Kate as she manages, using only her voice, to lift the song into familiar, weird territory. It’s the first time we’ve seen her use a subject matter of recent history, as she typically finds comfort in biographical figures from other eras. The follow-up, a song about a man with a deep fascination of numbers (“Ï€”) goes a step further before we get reeled back into middle-of-the-road song structures. “Bertie” is a song about her son (“you bring me so much joy/then you bring me more joy”) and it demonstrates her focus for the past seven years. Then she provides us with probably the strangest topic ever put on a Kate Bush album: washing clothes. As if you could imagine, “Mrs. Bartoluzzi” doesn’t work at all (“Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy/Get that dirty shirty clean”) and it’s quite possibly one of the worst songs on a Kate Bush record. The second disc is hands-down the winner and it saves “Aerial” from remaining in the adult contemporary section. Like the second side of “Hounds Of Love” (entitled “The Ninth Wave”), “A Sky Of Honey” follows a song-cycle that centers on the dusk til dawn passage of a day. Impeccably constructed, it tinkers with both weirdness and professionalism while (again) repeating the praises of everyday life. It seems that she has had enough time to focus on the things that most of us would tend to overlook. In some ways, it also illustrates that she is no ordinary woman and, perhaps, a tad out of touch with the rest of us. While you and I were getting through this thing called life, it seems that Kate was merely hanging around the estate, birdwatching. By then end of “A Sky Of Honey,” you can hear Kate laughing alongside actual birdcalls. This is the kind of strangeness that has been missing from her last two efforts and probably the reason why fans like me are so tolerant of a twelve year gap. At forty-seven, Kate’s voice remains strong and vital. It’s the focal point of “Aerial” but it doesn’t receive the workout of some of her earlier work. And like I mentioned before, this is probably the most organic record that Kate has made. It seems that she has finally stopped trying to make a contemporary sounding record and, instead, settled on making an album that reflects her current state of mind. And judging from “Aerial,” it sounds like things are pretty good at the Kate Bush castle.
