Review: Kate Bush – ’50 Words For Snow’

There was always a reason to suspect Kate Bush was something more than a singer/songwriter. Her new album settles it. She’s a storyteller. She was always a storyteller; it’s just that she started out using Emily Brontë’s characters.

Now these songs offer something bigger, something freer in form and scope than the operatic ‘Wuthering Heights’ or the breathless ‘Running Up That Hill’ – they are incredible, genre-defying songs, but Bush has never been one for resting on her laurels, so a new sound is necessary.

Step forward ‘50 Words For Snow’. Those little piano flourishes are jazzier, more sustained. That eloquent, silky voice has lost the fanciful swoops and dives of yesteryear; it comes to the front of the mix and gains a whole new poise and vitality. Kate Bush isn’t veering off into some distant tangent; this reinvention is more akin to comebacks like Vashti Bunyan’s ‘Lookaftering’, or Johnny Cash’s ‘American Recordings’ series; stripping the music down to its core elements, relying largely on the considerable power of her voice.

Opening and closing tracks ‘Snowflake’ and ‘Among Angels’ are the best examples of this raw, unaffected approach. Paced like a walk in the woods, the music comes so close to silence as to move you with the slightest stroke of a key. Spare, unhurried string sections drift in and out. We never seem rooted in any time signature; it feels like these songs go on forever, and what’s more, you want them to.

‘Lake Tahoe’ spooks the listener more than anything else, led in half-whispered howls and wandering, dissonant chords. Bush the storyteller slips into Angela Carter territory, sounding like a child strayed from the path in the dark, labryinthine forests of Eastern Europe. Strings weep and sway in the gentlest of breezes. There’s a tense feeling of stillness in the air.

The shimmering, resonant ‘Misty’ segues that dark mysticism into a dream-like trance. Bush’s voice moves from sinister to sensual; her key-strokes become lighter, gentler, like the touch of that first snowflake from the sky, melting on warm skin. Drums skip and brush across word pictures of beauty, told like haikus to winter-time.

If this is startting to sound overly poetic, then you at least have some idea of what this music does to you. This mellow soundtrack to dark country evenings doesn’t grab you, it creeps and tip-toes up inside your ear and works on you, letting each song grow on you until you can’t help but lose yourself in the whole album.

That title song does break the spell a little; even Stephen Fry was never going to get away with literally reciting 50 words for snow as Kate Bush counts him down. It’s the only entry here guilty of sounding repetitive, but as Meatloaf probably doesn’t say – don’t be sad. Six out of seven ain’t bad.

‘Wild Man’ was always the main attraction of this album for anyone who’s been near a decent radio station. The full, unedited version doesn’t disappoint. As close as Kate Bush will ever get to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ or CSN’s ‘Marrakesh Express’, this haiku of a song is as exotic as it is infectiously joyful. Just when you think you’ve pegged how the rest of the song will sound, it blasts you with an unexpected shift into middle eight enlightenment, and you love it all the more.

While we’re on surprises, an appearance by Elton John on ‘Snowed In A Wheeler St’ sounds to be the most refined and restrained work he’s done in years. This is no saccharine chart-squatter like ‘Candle in the Wind’; it’s a hell of a duet, lamenting a lost romance across the ages. Bush and John play two lovers, missing each other by chance in the firesmoke of burning Rome, the smog of Victorian London, the red mist of war in Europe and the clouds of dust in 9/11 New York.

Listening and re-listening to ‘50 Words For Snow’ only strengthens the idea that this is as much an album as it is a collection of short stories; full of compelling characters, strange and strong and lost in their whiteout world. With every listen, this album will reveal another layer, another part of the story you’d never heard before.

There’s a lifetime’s worth of listening here. Best get started.

(Simon Moore)