Review Summary: The wind, it blows through her old songs.
After
Hounds of Love in 1985, Kate Bush put out two more albums before her 12-year break, both of which were flawed, in one way or another.
The Sensual World, as artistically accomplished and consequent as it was, was prone to some hideous late-'80's production, with cluttered overdubs almost making the great lyrics inaudible.
The Red Shoes, as much fun as it was, was artistically flawed, the, now more sobre and sentimental, songwriting shifting through too much different genres and arrangements to make an impression as a whole.
As we all know, she pretty much altered her style with 2005's
Aerial, stretching out her songs and allowing air to enter the arrangements. The surprise album
Director's Cut re-works 11 of the songs from
The Sensual World and
The Red Shoes, and in the process manages to undo a lot of their flaws. It's a bit of a reckless gesture to include the title cuts of both albums, one of them even re-titled as 'Flower of the Mountain'. It seems like an almost offensive obliviation of these albums, something David Bowie tried to imply with his cover for
The Next Day but didn't accomplish quite as succesfully as Bush does here.
The least radical reworkings, 'Song of Solomon', 'Lily', 'And So Is Love' and 'Top of the City' bring out the human soul in these songs, which in their
Red Shoes-versions seemed a bit sterile and studied. Her voice is now fuller, rather more grounded and soulful than ethereal and cooing. Both 'Lily' and 'Top of the City' get suitable rock-treatments, with Bush really ripping it on the high notes. The songs convey their emotion - about fear and jealousy, respectively - more knowingly yet more aggressively. For the first time since
The Dreaming we really get a feeling that Bush was, and still is, a rock artist.
'Song of Solomon' strips some of its hyperbolic repetitions out and sounds more sensual, if anything. The joy of the beautiful and simple cry that she "do[es]n't want your bull***/just want your sexuality" is sung more convincingly than on the original. 'And So Is Love' is not a dramatic musical reworking, but by substituting 'sweet' for 'sad' in the sentence "And now we see that life is sad/And so is love" seems a bit at odds with the minor-key mood of the song, which doesn't mean I'm sad she feels better now, though.
'The Red Shoes' doesn't seem to have gotten sweeter. Bush makes the rather light-hearted and clean arrangement of the original more dense and aggressive, with a background chorus who shout rather than sings, and make the darker elements in the song more clearly audible, with Bush doing her low-register demon voices as she did on
Aerial's title track, drawing the track into mayhem.
'Flower of the Mountain', with the originally intended James Joyce-text, is more subdued than 'The Sensual World' and draws it nicely into the
Aerial-language. More sparse, now over 5 minutes instead of just over 3, the uillean-pipe melody is exploited in all of its beauty, and the text now seems more pure, instead of the original paraphrase. The same stripping-down is heard on 'Deeper Understanding', which adds a suitably cold electronic auto-tune onto her son's voice to create the computer voice and adds a 3-minute coda onto the original version. The cut-up vocal techniques contrast beautifully with the now foregrounded Trio Bulgarka's melodic lines and the newly added harmonica. Once again, her voice also sounds more spontaneous than it did on the original.
The two most radical reworkings are in the centre of this album. The ballads 'This Woman's Work' from
The Sensual World and 'Moments of Pleasure', pretty much its lesser
Red Shoes-counterpart. Although you could question the slightly dated piano sound used on the former, it very quickly draws you into reverbed, ethereal vocal samples, rhythmless as Björk's 'All Is Full of Love'. The track becomes enclosed in such a pensive and particular universe where thoughts like "I should be crying but I just can't let it show" don't tumble over one another. It seems we are inside the brain of the about-to-be father, rather than just hearing him sum up the way he feels.
'Moments of Pleasure' is the most perfect reworking on here. Bush strips the pathetic emoting from the chorus, actually removing its text and have its melody hummed by a choir. The harmonic language is not that of a musical show-stopper anymore, but a Debussyan palette of pastel, shifting keys to accomodate a feeling that seems to enter spontaneously. Bush fully exploits her lower register here, and seems to have thought about how grief about loved ones develops over the years. It's still there, but it's not a burst of emotion. It's a tiny flame continuing to burn in the back of the head.
'Never Be Mine', which I thought was a very accomplished song in its original version, has also gotten more spontaneous over time, sadly stripping away all of the melody in the chorus, and for me, this is the only cut that hasn't gotten better over time. Sure, the verses are better-sung, not as overwrought as in the original and the new chorus melody does have its charm, but the original melody is the one that sticks. While listening to this version, I always tend to superimpose that melody onto it in my head.
Then there's 'Rubberband Girl'. Gone are the trumpets, saxophones, marimba's, trombones, hyper-elastic voice. Enter the guitar, synths, bass and drums. 'Rubberband Girl' has become a garage track, albeit a very funny one. The shifting to this genre shows that Bush indeed
is "a rubberband bouncing back to life/a rubberband bend the beat". It's a burst of joy at the end of this collection and continues Bush's newfound spontaneity while also being less overproduced than the original.
The only way to realize what an excellent album this is, is to let it wash over you and let Bush surprise you with all her twist and turns, almost all of which are succesful, both as reworkings and as a new album, in a new order. It's a new product. If you don't mind her toying with your nostalgia, revising every sound she had dreamt up on these tracks, it's an exhilarating listen.
There's so much air in this album that any listener feels at peace. It's both sonically and artistically accomplished where
The Sensual World and
The Red Shoes were flawed. It takes a lot of courage and experience for an artist to so radically overthrow previous work and conclusions, and Bush knows how to make that courage into an extremely enjoyable album.
