Hounds of Love (2018

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On her next outing, Never for Ever, Bush took over the production reigns with the help of engineer Jon Kelly. It was a major step in Bush’s assertion artistic independence. “Obviously the production is such a big part of what the song is,” she told Claude Van Heye in 2005. “It’s every bit as much what the song is as the lyric and...I mean, it is the song.” I am a Lady Gaga fan, and our music tastes are very varied compare to some fanbases! I see Kate Bush in Lady Gaga a lot (not the other way round, obviously)...the theatrics, how certain songs are sung! Similar women, except one excels, and I'm not afraid to admit that as a Lady Gaga fan!! Creatively, the struggle paid off. The Dreaming was a stunning artistic and sonic leap forward for Bush. But critical reception for the album was mixed, and the public was even less kind. While The Dreaming peaked at number three in the U.K., it stayed there only 10 weeks on the way to becoming Bush’s lowest-selling album.

That leaves the recent 2018 remaster, which was done by Pink Floyd engineer James Guthrie in collaboration with Bush.As fans scooped up copies of Hounds of Love (the first Bush album released on vinyl, cassette, and CD simultaneously), the music press lavished the album with praise. Released in August 1985, “Running Up That Hill” reached number three on the U.K. singles chart and number 30 on the U.S. Hot 100, Bush’s highest U.S. chart position since 1978. The single’s success gave the album a boost when it was released a month later, reaching number one on the U.K. charts and number 30 on the Billboard 200. It was also a success in Canada and across Europe, selling over a million albums worldwide.

Unfortunately, the 1997 is a victim of the “ Loudness War.” Whether measured by crest factor DR score or R128 dynamic range, Blair’s 1997 CD is markedly less dynamic than the 1985 Cooper CDs. A comparison of “Running Up that Hill” waveforms in Audacity bears out this fact: With traces of classical, operatic, tribal and twisted pop styles, Kate creates music that observes no boundaries of musical structure or inner expression…. With no plans to tour America, Kate is likely to remain obscure on this side of the Atlantic. While her eclecticism is welcomed and rewarded in her homeland her genius goes ignored here — a situation that is truly a shame for an artist so adventurous and naturally theatrical. That doesn’t mean that she didn’t agonize over it until the last minute. Ian Cooper, who mastered all of Bush’s albums from The Dreaming to The Red Shoes, remembers the mastering of Hounds of Love taking the longest time. “I won’t say it was a nightmare, but…I have a funny feeling we were still doing it when it was released,” he told Thompson. “I remember asking her when it was coming out, and she said, ‘It’s out!’ I said, ‘Then why are we doing it?’ and she said, ‘I think we could this and that right.’ It’s tempting to surmise that nothing is ever quite finished to her satisfaction.”Disjunctive, idiosyncratic and so very, very inventive, Kate Bush's 1985 magnum opus, "Hounds of Love", was the intentionally streamlined yet defiant response to complaints regarding her efficiency in the studio and detractors of the lyrical and structural esotericism inherent in her work. Greatly emboldened by the advances of the digital age, the ever-experimental Bush went one further, building a home studio and developing her latest new material to her satisfaction, subsequently dividing the end product into two distinctive sections. Even under contemporaneous scrutiny, both parts, replete with layered electronic instrumentation, sound effects, and expressive yet refined vocal acrobatics, successfully cohere, and, if persevered with, the full measure still holds up and works incredibly well despite its ambitious structure. In her early use of the Fairlight, Bush prefigured production techniques that would become more and more common as the use of computers in music advanced. “She responded instinctively to all the sonic and cultural implications of the Fairlight,” John Walters, who helped Bush program the Fairlight, told biographer Graeme Thompson. “She was naturally ahead of her time and, of course, went on to do much more with it as the instrument developed. She made the most of it for her own idiosyncratic music.” Despite its sonic limitations and clunky interface, Bush used the Fairlight to transform her already highly idiosyncratic take on piano-based singer-songwriting into something wholly unique and largely indescribable. “Discovering the Fairlight gave me a whole new writing tool, as well as an arranging tool…,” Bush explained in 1990, “With a Fairlight you’ve got everything, a tremendous range of things. It completely opened me up to sounds and textures, and I could experiment with these in a way I could never have done without it.” In the years since, The Dreaming has received a critical reevaluation and come to be regarded as a underrated classic. At the time, however, it was seen as a dagger through Bush’s commercial viability. As Thompson summarized in his excellent biography: “[ The Dreaming] had cost her a fortune, way beyond the advance she received, took her a year of almost solid recording, hopping around studios and between engineers, and it had pushed her to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. The company hated it and it killed her as a singles artists for four years.”