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I bought this in 1986, having heard Bill Humphries sing the praises of Kate Bush for months. It was the Spring-Summer of my triumphant return to UT Austin (before the inevitable Second Fall from Grace that was to occur a couple of years later), and while I had listened to this album quite a bit during my commute back and forth to classes that Spring, it cemented its hold in my heart during Winedale summer, as I prepared for the Shakespeare course that Mike Godwin had instructed me to enroll in during the Spring, then followed up for an intensive Summer section. Listening to it now reminds me of that summer, especially the first song, "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" and the entire "Ninth Wave" second half, in that I had indeed made a deal with God that I would try and turn my school life around and I was immersed, not so much in water, but in the creativity and spirit of Winedale. The album is somewhat bittersweet, and so was that summer, for while I indeed did well that year, it was a rough period, made more so by the ties I had been making with my girlfriend of the time (who would eventually become my wife, uhm, ten years later).
I had been primed to fall for the Divine Miss Bush for years, having spent my high school years listening to a progression of pop music (Elton John and Fleetwood Mac) to "hard rock" (Styx and Journey) to "art rock" (Genesis, Rush and Yes). The next step along that road was to experimental rock, and Laurie Anderson had been my introduction and Kate Bush became my guide in the form. At the time, since I hadn't heard much of Bush's previous work, I simply saw her as a companion to Peter Gabriel (she had, after all, performed a duet with him on his recent album, So, as had Anderson), who also went into the studio to drench her songs in layers and layers of production. The strangeness of some of "The Ninth Wave" washed over me, and it wasn't until years later that I actually took notice of how many things were actually going on in those songs. Now that I look at this album and compare it to her previous work, I see how some had rightly accused Bush of "selling out" to pop music, much like they had accused Gabriel of the same (my favorite memory of which is my friend Karl Rehn's rewrite of the chorus of "Sledgehammer" as "I want to be / Phil Collins"). Hounds of Love is defiantly pop, but this is pop with an edge.
Take, for example, the opening song, whose title was changed because her record company feared that "A Deal with God" would raise fundamentalist hackles in the States and Italy. Its insistent drum beat over the atmospheric synths belie the lyrics, which have nothing whatsover to do with the diety, but instead describe the love/hate symbiosis in most relationships. The titular deal is the narrator's urgent desire to be able to switch places, so as to better understand each other. (Of course, in all modesty, you could also read the lyrics as the narrator wanting to swap places with her lover so they could experience orgasm from each other's point of view. I'm just saying, and those moans in the background bear me out on this, I think.)
"It's in the trees! It's coming!" What? This is a pop record? What was that? That was the beginning to the second song, "Hounds of Love," that's even more over the top in its attempt to describe how much it feels to be the object of someone's affection, or perhaps the narrator's fear of being in love itself. As she runs from those hounds, she's unsure if she wants to be in love or to be pursued by love or to give in to her own feelings. I was 20, and in the throes of my first love affair, and I knew how she felt to be hounded by love.
"The Big Sky" changes the mood to be a little more light-hearted, almost childish, as the narrator rolls in the grass and focuses her attention on the shapes that she can see in the clouds. What I like most about this song is the vocal nonsense sounds in the background that are almost like Philip Glass in their repetition. Each of these first three songs are "big music," in the phraseology of Mike Scott of the Waterboys: they fill the room/car/arena with their sounds, so much so that the louder you play the song the more you hear going on.
But, as celebratory as the last song was, Bush quickly turns to a darker subject, and one of my favorite songs she has ever done, "Mother Stands for Comfort." Unlike the ambiguous nature of the first couple of songs, it's not hard to follow the lyrics on this one: from the breaking glass at the beginning, to the industrial background sounds, this is a song about a broken person, who adores his mother who "knows that I've been doing something wrong / But she won't say anything." In the chorus, the narrator even calls himself a madman. This is a sincerely creepy song, in which the music both supports its eerie theme as well as coats it over in slinkiness.
From one child to another, "Cloudbusting" is told from the point-of-view of Peter Reich, the young son of Wilhelm Reich. Drawn directly from Peter's book about his experience, it tells the story of when the government agents came for his father, interspersed with a child's love for his father and the dreams his father had instilled in him. It's an effective piece in that it makes you want to know more about Reich and his beliefs about Organon.
Thus ends side one on the album (for this was when artists still thought of Side A and Side B to match the order of songs on a piece of vinyl). Side B has an overall title of "The Ninth Wave," and describes a shipwreck survivor lost at sea, struggling to keep his or her head above the water. The opening song, "And Dream of Sleep," sets up this situation, and also manages to prefigure some of the experimental sections that follow in its small snippets of sound that merge into a collage all the while Bush sings sweetly about being seduced by sleep, which she cannot fall into lest she drop into the deep water and drown. The next section, "Under Ice," is chilling (pun intended), for the water the protagonist is in is cold, and the very real danger that she faces is underpinned by the minor key and urgent violin part. "Waking the Witch" puts the sound collage in the foreground, like a view into the protagonist's mind, a jumble of phrases and voices that abruptly seques into a call and response between a sinister male-type voice and a desperately stuttering staccato female voice, separated by sections of childlike chanting. This is the weirdest song on this album, and while there's nothing as outre in it as the braying donkey in "Get Out of the House" on The Dreaming, it would be hard to describe this as pop. (Interestingly enough, it's theme of judge and jury and the helicopter sample that ends it recalls, unintentionally I think, Pink Floyd's The Wall.) Returning to a more sedate, if still not normal, mood, "Watching You Without Me" starts as a lullabye, broken by a bridge of either nonsense or foreign lyrics not repeated in the liner notes as well as a repeat of the stuttering "talk to me, talk to me, talk to me" heard earlier. The point of the song, I think, is to provide a calm trough between "Waking the Witch" and "Jig of Life," the latter being a minor-key and darkly urgent variation on the traditional jig. By this time, the drowning theme has been downplayed to some extent, as these middle songs likely portray an inner struggle in the protagonist. "Hello Earth" brings us back to the story, however, by an implied comparison of the drowning person in the overall black sea to the Earth in the inky depths of the Universe. "With just one hand held up high / I can blot you out / out of sight" is a line written as if the Earth is viewed from off-Earth (the Moon or a space capsule), and later in the song the viewer sees storms forming over America and tries to warn the sailors and other in the water, including the poor drowning person, who is in the path of the storm. And then the finale comes, like the calm following the storm, a simple love song that is either the protagonists parting thoughts or, if you want to believe that she is actually rescued before drowning, her affirmation of life and understanding of the tenuousness of our existence by reiterating what she plans to do: "I'll kiss the ground / I'll tell my mother / I'll tell my father / I'll tell my loved one / I'll tell my brothers / How much I love them."
Is this pop? Maybe, perhaps, somewhat. Bush had always played with pop music tropes from her first success, the book turned song "Wuthering Heights," and each successive album contained some nods towards a simple ballad, but it wouldn't be until two albums following this one that Miss Bush would write her own "Sledgehammer" in "Rubberband Girl" (on The Red Shoes, an album that would also feature a song co-written and performed as a duet with his purpleness, Prince). To me, though, Hounds of Love is Bush's career high point, where her experimental art sensibilities were leavened with enough pop understanding to achieve a masterpiece of production, performance, and purpose, propelled with a singular power of vision and which wraps up in a peaceful platitude. Other albums contain highlights; only this one is perfection.
I recall once telling Mike Godwin that this was one of my favorite albums, to which his reply was, "But you can't dance to it." I'm not sure if he was being facetious at the time, referring of course to the traditional rating comment on American Bandstand, but it's a comment that's lived with me to this day. Of course you can't dance to Rush--it's progressive, "arty," rock, that's meant to be listened to, and somewhat closely at that, kind of like Take Five in the jazz world. Moving Pictures is Rush at their best, full of time and key changes, masterful interplay between lead and bass guitar, innovative synth sounds and production, and the best drumming in modern rock. While Geddy Lee's high-pitched nasally voice is not for all, this is an album where his screeches are somewhat muted, and he often sings in mid-range rather than the higher register that characterized earlier albums (as he has aged, he's lowered the range at which he sings on each successive Rush album it seems). The lyrics are an overview of the classic Rush themes: science fiction ("Red Barchetta"), the disillusionment of youth ("Tom Sawyer"), fantasy ("Witch Hunt"), science ("Vital Signs"), fame or the life of an artist (or at least, being in the spotlight, as in "The Camera Eye" and "Limelight"). Nothing was that new here, in comparison to Rush's previous albums, but here it was presented in more manageable chunks (unlike, say, the Cygnus tunes that take up entire LP sides) with radio-friendly production.
"Tom Sawyer" is probably the most played Rush song and it sounds as fresh today as when I first heard it in the 80s. The lyrics are nonsensical to some degree, almost as much as "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads, another big song of the time, where the lyrics are more of a style than necessarily trying to tell a story or make a point. For Rush, that was something of a novelty. Most of Neil Peart's lyricism was based on stories, such as the previously mentioned Cygnus songs, or the side-long epic "2112." When they didn't tell stories, they were fairly clear what the songs were about, such as "Spirit of Radio" being about the business of music radio or "The Trees" being a warning about bigotry. But there are moments of "Tom Sawyer" where you just wonder what the hell Peart was smoking to come up with "The world is, the world is/Love and life are deep/Maybe as his skies are wide." But the song works, and the sense you get from it is that Tom, Mark Twain's rebel child, still exists today.
Much more like their normal songs is "Red Barchetta," based on a science fiction story. In it, the protagonist talks about escaping the stultifying confines of the modern city to escape to his uncle's farm in the country, where his uncle keeps an old automobile that the protagonist then takes out, "commit[ing] his weekly crime." It's basically the same story as "2112," except made much more palatable by not being about music, but about cars, and clocking in at a decent Album Oriented Rock single time limit. The chase sequence between the government aircars and the old automobile gives Lee and Alex Lifeson another opportunity to play dueling guitars, something they've liked to do since "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" from the Fly By Night album.
"YYZ," the instrumental on the album, is named after the airport code for Toronto Pearson International Airport, a code that Rush, being Canadian, were always happy to see, because it meant they were headed home. What's interesting about the opening to it is that the guitar part plays out the letters YYZ in morse code. "Limelight" and "The Camera Eye" are companion pieces of a sort, although the former talks about being the focus of the camera while the latter is a descriptive piece that tries to put into words what is being caught by the camera as it is being used. Of the songs on this album, "The Camera Eye" is probably my least favorite, but that's really no fault of its own, but just how it pales in comparison to the other six songs.
The final two songs are as strong as the opening two. "Witch Hunt" repeats a motif originally used by Peart in the Cygnus pair, wherein he compares something in the past to something in the present. Here, the Salem witch trials to modern discrimination. It's pretentious and would have collapsed under its conceit if not for the moody nature of the music that fits the general paranoia and tension that Peart is trying to say go hand-in-hand between the two time periods. (Interestingly enough, for a band and an album that has always been the bane of the Christian right--something about their pentangle in a circle symbol has always made the more paranoid fundamentalists brand Rush as a satanic band--this is the only song on the album that refers to anything actually otherworldly. Most of the songs are about technology or modern life, not cavorting demons.) The album ends with "Vital Signs," which should have been as big a hit as "Tom Sawyer," and is one of my all-time favorite Rush tracks. It begins with a repeated synthesizer sequence that musically represents a EKG graph, with a very staccato Lifeson guitar part. The lyrics are wonderful, with some quite strange words being placed together in a rock song, such as in the opening, "Unstable condition/A symptom of life/In mental and environmental change/Atmospheric disturbance/The feverish flux/Of human interface and interchange." This is a far cry from what rock and roll was originally about--i.e., sex, or at least romance--and for me typifies why I was drawn to them, because they weren't afraid to be intelligent.
This is an album that I've listened to since high school, and it has continued to hold up for me over the years. While I can still listen to many of the other bands that I first started listening to at that time, including Styx, Journey, Genesis, and Yes, I consider many of those guilty pleasures, perhaps not something I'd mention as a favorite to a new acquaintance. I'm not embarrassed by this album, though. Genesis and Yes may have had the same musicianship and intelligence, but their songs didn't have the hooks that Rush had, and while Styx and Journey may have had the hooks, their music is actually quite simple and formulaic, more obvious in retrospect than it was for me at the time. Re-listening to this album to write this review only renewed my appreciation for it and for Rush.
Comments
Styx, Journey, Genesis, Yes, Rush...I hope you are also checking out the NEW new prog like Mew, Muse and Mars Volta!
I recall once telling Mike Godwin that this was one of my favorite albums, to which his reply was, "But you can't dance to it." I'm not sure if he was being facetious at the time, referring of course to the traditional rating comment on American Bandstand, but it's a comment that's lived with me to this day. Of course you can't dance to Rush--it's progressive, "arty," rock, that's meant to be listened to, and somewhat closely at that, kind of like Take Five in the jazz world. Moving Pictures is Rush at their best, full of time and key changes, masterful interplay between lead and bass guitar, innovative synth sounds and production, and the best drumming in modern rock. While Geddy Lee's high-pitched nasally voice is not for all, this is an album where his screeches are somewhat muted, and he often sings in mid-range rather than the higher register that characterized earlier albums (as he has aged, he's lowered the range at which he sings on each successive Rush album it seems). The lyrics are an overview of the classic Rush themes: science fiction ("Red Barchetta"), the disillusionment of youth ("Tom Sawyer"), fantasy ("Witch Hunt"), science ("Vital Signs"), fame or the life of an artist (or at least, being in the spotlight, as in "The Camera Eye" and "Limelight"). Nothing was that new here, in comparison to Rush's previous albums, but here it was presented in more manageable chunks (unlike, say, the Cygnus tunes that take up entire LP sides) with radio-friendly production.
"Tom Sawyer" is probably the most played Rush song and it sounds as fresh today as when I first heard it in the 80s. The lyrics are nonsensical to some degree, almost as much as "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads, another big song of the time, where the lyrics are more of a style than necessarily trying to tell a story or make a point. For Rush, that was something of a novelty. Most of Neil Peart's lyricism was based on stories, such as the previously mentioned Cygnus songs, or the side-long epic "2112." When they didn't tell stories, they were fairly clear what the songs were about, such as "Spirit of Radio" being about the business of music radio or "The Trees" being a warning about bigotry. But there are moments of "Tom Sawyer" where you just wonder what the hell Peart was smoking to come up with "The world is, the world is/Love and life are deep/Maybe as his skies are wide." But the song works, and the sense you get from it is that Tom, Mark Twain's rebel child, still exists today.
Much more like their normal songs is "Red Barchetta," based on a science fiction story. In it, the protagonist talks about escaping the stultifying confines of the modern city to escape to his uncle's farm in the country, where his uncle keeps an old automobile that the protagonist then takes out, "commit[ing] his weekly crime." It's basically the same story as "2112," except made much more palatable by not being about music, but about cars, and clocking in at a decent Album Oriented Rock single time limit. The chase sequence between the government aircars and the old automobile gives Lee and Alex Lifeson another opportunity to play dueling guitars, something they've liked to do since "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" from the Fly By Night album.
"YYZ," the instrumental on the album, is named after the airport code for Toronto Pearson International Airport, a code that Rush, being Canadian, were always happy to see, because it meant they were headed home. What's interesting about the opening to it is that the guitar part plays out the letters YYZ in morse code. "Limelight" and "The Camera Eye" are companion pieces of a sort, although the former talks about being the focus of the camera while the latter is a descriptive piece that tries to put into words what is being caught by the camera as it is being used. Of the songs on this album, "The Camera Eye" is probably my least favorite, but that's really no fault of its own, but just how it pales in comparison to the other six songs.
The final two songs are as strong as the opening two. "Witch Hunt" repeats a motif originally used by Peart in the Cygnus pair, wherein he compares something in the past to something in the present. Here, the Salem witch trials to modern discrimination. It's pretentious and would have collapsed under its conceit if not for the moody nature of the music that fits the general paranoia and tension that Peart is trying to say go hand-in-hand between the two time periods. (Interestingly enough, for a band and an album that has always been the bane of the Christian right--something about their pentangle in a circle symbol has always made the more paranoid fundamentalists brand Rush as a satanic band--this is the only song on the album that refers to anything actually otherworldly. Most of the songs are about technology or modern life, not cavorting demons.) The album ends with "Vital Signs," which should have been as big a hit as "Tom Sawyer," and is one of my all-time favorite Rush tracks. It begins with a repeated synthesizer sequence that musically represents a EKG graph, with a very staccato Lifeson guitar part. The lyrics are wonderful, with some quite strange words being placed together in a rock song, such as in the opening, "Unstable condition/A symptom of life/In mental and environmental change/Atmospheric disturbance/The feverish flux/Of human interface and interchange." This is a far cry from what rock and roll was originally about--i.e., sex, or at least romance--and for me typifies why I was drawn to them, because they weren't afraid to be intelligent.
This is an album that I've listened to since high school, and it has continued to hold up for me over the years. While I can still listen to many of the other bands that I first started listening to at that time, including Styx, Journey, Genesis, and Yes, I consider many of those guilty pleasures, perhaps not something I'd mention as a favorite to a new acquaintance. I'm not embarrassed by this album, though. Genesis and Yes may have had the same musicianship and intelligence, but their songs didn't have the hooks that Rush had, and while Styx and Journey may have had the hooks, their music is actually quite simple and formulaic, more obvious in retrospect than it was for me at the time. Re-listening to this album to write this review only renewed my appreciation for it and for Rush.
Comments
I have been listening to this album on a regular basis since I first heard it in high school (which was a loooong time ago..). Limelight remains one of my favorite songs.
I have seen Rush live a few times and I was always impressed with how they were able to reproduce their sound in such a precise way. Add the energy of the crowd and it was such a visceral experience... their name is quite apropos!
Comments
My favorite Kate Bush album, and one of my favorite all-time albums! Greatm insightful review and comments. My favorotie song has always been "Mother Stands for Comfort," especially when halfway through this beautiful song, in the background you can hear the clipped, gated yelling from "Waking the Witch." It's a great contrast.