You have to understand before we go into this review that there is no way I can give a review of Hounds of Love with any kind of critical objectivity (as much as you can be objective in music anyway). I first heard the album when I was seven, as it was of the only albums we owned in the house at the time, and loved it immediately. When others my age were listening to “Last Resort” on their MP3 players, I was listening to “Cloudbusting” (and other things, don’t worry I’m not completely mad). And when I got into collecting vinyl records, the first three records I owned were The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and this album we are talking about right now (I’m fortunate to have an older version, because new pressings are known to be pretty terrible). But regardless, I shall try my hardest to be a consummate professional.
Despite its reputation as pretty much an instant classic, Hounds of Love came off the back of a move away from the public eye to such an extent that one British magazine had written a “Where are they now?” piece on Kate Bush. It turned out that she had been staying in her private studio, the last move of autonomy that meant she could work at the pace she wanted to. And with material as strong as Hounds of Love coming out of the gate, no-one would judge. This is an unbelievably lush atmospheric, dreamy record that both dives deep into the world of synth pop in a way that Kate had never done, and fully utilised the capabilities of the vinyl and cassette formats by presenting what is in essence two EPs encompassed by a similar aesthetic and thematic quality: Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave.
The first half of the album – Hounds of Love – is where we will find many of the Kate Bush’s most famous singles. “Running up that Hill (A Deal with God)” kicks off the record with its sweeping, subtle synth strings before the pulsating electronic drums take over and force the reader to imagine the kind of epic climb that would place (in my mind it looks like a scene from The Tale of Princess Kaguya). Of course this is not about an actual climb, but a song about the lengths the narrator would go to change positions with another, an amazing call to empathy as grand as the screeches coming from Kate’s own backing vocals.
That empathy and intensity is contrasted with big grand dreamscapes and lush orchestral on both sides of this album, and thus is a big part of why they go well together (more evidence for this later). “Mother Stands for Comfort” – the weakest song on the first half but still a great track – is about a child’s belief that there mother will take care of him even after committing terrible crimes, and Kate’s comfortable motherly voice means the lines between the two points of view of merged together, conjoined both emotionally and genetically. On the dreamier, surrealist side we have the title track, with its thundering combination of electronic and acoustic drums and a cello sound as fast as the heartbeat of a character who can’t handle this Wordworthian Romantic setting, of falling in love and of this metaphorical forest (the song samples the film Night of the Demon, again demonstrating Kate’s penchant for horror). “The Big Sky” also conveys this abstract and the concrete by taking on the point of view of a child looking at the clouds, with Kate’s excited wails, the fast bass and the glistening guitars adding to this intentionally adolescent feel.
The cloud imagery, a kind of adolescence, longing emotions, all culminate in the first half with one of my all-time favourite songs: “Cloudbusting.” Although a mixture of real and synth strings, it is song that sounds almost Renaissance, something that has been around for centuries. It is a story about Wilhelm Reich – a psychoanalyst who said he had a machine called the “cloudbuster” that produced rain clouds – told by his son after his father’s sudden imprisonment, crying out that he was “too small/ In their big black car/to be a threat to the men in power” (incidentally, check out this music video directed by Julian Doyle, starring Donald Sutherland and partially conceived by one Terry Gilliam. The process of Cloudbusting looks very Terry Gilliam indeed.) It is a harrowing and beautiful with those marching strings and choral voices being a climax in its own right.
And it indeed is. And isn’t. In the same way that “Cloudbusting” is exemplary of two sides – elemental and human – converging, this is where we move to the more conceptual side of Hounds of Love entitled The Ninth Wave. Now, there is a precedence to these kind of projects in music, with albums like Low and Remain in Light having darker and slower second sides, and the way each track feeds into each other recalling the best of prog-rock and the Abbey Road Medley (I first made this connection when I bought the vinyls). But even with that there is something particularly special about this composition, mostly in how both ethereal and horrifying it is.
It starts like a comforting dream, with the track literally titled “And Dream of Sheep,” a precursor to some of the amazing piano ballads on The Sensual World with the sampled voices and flutes adding to the feeling of just giving your body away to the conceptual body of water that makes the basis of this piece. But it’s only after you have given yourself up that The Ninth Wave shows its other, darker intent. Those missing Kate Bush’s tendency to put on different voices find it in “Under Ice” with the lower, more aggressive voices of Bush’s chorus both commanding this person to get out of the water, whilst simultaneously sounding like they are forcing them in there (a feeling coupled with the violent stabs of those strings). The title The Ninth Wave is taken from a Tennyson poem about the Legend of King Arthur, and from here the waters are as darkly magical as the ones that, in some versions of the myth, Lady Morgana would eventually habit.
This horror mainly culminates in the next two tracks: “Waking the Witch” and “Watching You Without Me.” The former one of these tracks is the most overtly – and genuinely – scary, with its theme of witches, and the sampling of voices all pleasing for the protagonist to wake merging into surreal soundscapes. Then the electronics kicks in, Bush’s voice snippet sounding like gargles and strangles underneath a demonic voice as the track then moves from church bells, dark synths and helicopter blades that merge into drum machines. It is the theme to horrific uncertainties. And whilst “Watching You Without Me” is not overtly horror – in fact the synth riff and and organic drums are almost relaxing – the lyrics detailing to ghosts and a voice that claims it isn’t really there leaves one with an uneasy feeling. In its nightmarish and magical second half, the structure of Hounds of Love makes connections to me with the Book of Daniel, where the first half are individual stories, and the second half is multiple visions of an upcoming apocalypse.
Fortunately that nightmare doesn’t last forever. The lush “Jig of Life” makes one almost forget there was any troubles to begin with. Like “Cloudbusting” another track that sounds like it was lifted from another time period, and like songs from The Dreaming clearly shows a Celtic influence that is both grounded with its pounding drums and Uilleann pipes, but the narrative voices telling us we are still not back in Earth. That process begins to occur with “Hello Earth,” which starts with piano chords reminiscent of the first track of The Ninth Wave, before moving in to a build up of male choir voices as the main character makes their way out of the water, and in turn out of this time manipulating dreamscape. Despite all the nightmarish images prior, and despite being on the edge of death, this world we’re now leaving is still one to mourn, thus the departing line of this song; “Go to sleep little earth.”
And when we get to the final song, uplifting and light “The Morning Fog”, we see both a conclusion to this grand narrative and the reason why these seemingly two separate project work so well together. Although we are back in the Earth, there is still the dream like sensation of being born and falling in “the sweet morning fog.” The love that extended to the earth (“kiss the ground”) is immediately followed by blunt, beautiful proclamations of love to family. Earth, dreams, adolescence and the uttermost amount of empathy: we are back in “Cloudbusting” territory, the two ends in some way mirroring each other.
As opposed to multi-layered avant-garde rock of The Dreaming, Hounds of Love’s pleasures are very immediate and easy to understand – especially in the first half – although there is much that is able to be read into as you can tell by this longer than normal post (I can’t help it, I love this album so much). I can imagine this difference being the deciding factor on which you will prefer. But as proven in previous Record Club entries on Let’s Dance, Little Creatures and many other a pop album, an amazing piece of progressive pop is just as musically worthwhile as something more overtly subversive. Hounds of Love is the some of the best pop music ever committed to tape, and whilst my tastes have changed enough in the last few years to believe that The Dreaming is probably the best Kate Bush album, Hounds of Love to me is the best Kate Bush album.
What do you think though?
Kate Bush Album Rankings
1.Hounds of Love (tie)
1.The Dreaming (tie)
3. Never for Ever
4.The Kick Inside
5.Lionheart