#Hounds of love album review series

Possibly an allusion to Ivan Aivazovsky’s 1850 painting of the same name, the suite explores the story of a woman who is lost at sea, trying as best as she can to not succumb to sleep and thus drown. These first five tracks comprise the Hounds of Love portion of the album, while side B is a seven-part suite entitled The Ninth Wave, which forms the album’s most conceptual and experimental section.

#Hounds of love album review series

One of her most well-known songs, it starts off a series of five tracks that made up side A on the initial vinyl release of the album. The album begins with the exquisite wobbly synth intro to ‘Running Up That Hill’. Sonically, it still sounds original today. Hounds of Love takes you on a journey through space and time. Using the newly ubiquitous technology of the Fairlight CMI synthesiser and sampler, which she used extensively on The Dreaming, Bush was able to create some of Hounds‘ most identifiably iconic sounds, while also furnishing the record with a sinister yet spiritual quality achieved through the amalgamation of unorthodox textures. But as a result of this ostensible career decline, Bush isolated herself for over a year in her newly built 24-track home studio in Kent (for the most part), composing music and recording demos for the new album. Its standing has certainly been rehabilitated in the years since, and it is now regarded as her creative peak. Three years earlier, she had released her fourth studio album, The Dreaming, which sold relatively poorly and received patronisingly critical reviews. It is also one of the greatest albums ever made.

Hounds of Love is Kate Bush’s masterpiece. Her audacious craft pushed the boundaries of what women in music could do, and the complete artistic control she had over her work was almost unthinkable in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Vincent, Lady Gaga, Grimes, Lorde, Perfume Genius, or even Fiona Apple (who similarly retreated from the public eye after her debut) would exist without Kate Bush, who became the first woman to have a self-written song go number one in the UK with ‘Wuthering Heights’. It’s difficult to imagine a world where Björk, Florence Welch, St. That isn’t to say that she hasn’t been as widely influential there as she has on this island - she, after all, is the Queen of Art Pop, and her presence can be felt in the works of many femme and queer icons of the past few decades. But what small-minded folks couldn’t understand opened me up to new possibilities in the world of art and music. Like many extraordinary British or European acts, Bush had a more difficult time achieving commercial and critical success in the American market. Here was an album, an artist, that embraced so much otherness but was simultaneously proudly English. When I sat down and listened to the album for the first time, I felt a sense of kinship, like it had been my destiny all along to meet the ethereal Kate Bush like my education was finally complete. As a music enthusiast, I had always known who Kate Bush was, although my Canadian upbringing didn’t really expose me to much more than that. When I first heard Hounds of Love I had just moved to London. What do you write about one of the few albums that quite literally changed your life?