Kate Bush - Hounds of Love

EMI

September 16th, 1985.

On the periphery of Pop music, laying at the cutting edge of forward thinking material, lies Kate Bush's fifth studio album Hounds of Love. The aura surrounding the album, an intrinsic quality of the album because of its haunting, semi-sleep-y contents, wraps the material under a veil of intrigue and mystery. Kate Bush's creatively all-encompassing Pop masterpiece Hounds of Love turns 40. It's the quintessential Art Pop record. 

Engineered to a masterful degree, Hounds of Love plays out like a futuristic take on how to arrange and produce contemporary pieces. I think it's fair to say the Talk Talk crew took some inspiration from this for their works a small bit later in the decade - most notably Colour of Spring and Spirit of Eden. I find they have similar qualities on the full-on immersive front. Maybe there's some studio overlap in there somewhere?

Like an atmospheric trip through an aural daydream - especially on side B - Hounds of Love pieces together like an artistic standpoint. Split into two halves - A-side: Hounds of Love, B-side: The Ninth Wave - Hounds of Love plays like a tale in two sides. The second side, known as The Ninth Wave, comes together as a conceptual suite about a woman drifting alone in the sea at night. The terror, the torture, the unassailable tide. 

Masterfully produced, engineered, all that can be done with music, Hounds of Love starts off like a rush of blood to the head with "Running Up That Hill". It's one of the finest intro tracks of all-time. Talk about setting the stage, the standard. Tribal, driving drums put your mind on hot pursuit. Tough times are ahead and the only way out is through. That hill isn't gonna get over itself. The world is there to be won. 

"D'you wanna hear about the deal we're making?" 

The ties that bind are tightening. Inseparable. The Hounds of Love are haunting. Howling. Sweeping you under as you dream of sheep. Nightmares await on the other side of sleep. The hypnagogic state has a funny way of letting you freefall. It also loves a good entrapment plot. The ice holds your being like a bug trapped in crystal clear amber. You wake in the Galtymore as a small lad with thighs like tree trunks swings you around. His eyes shine. His breathe stinks. He's infatuated with you. Knows everything about you. Your past; your future. 

The big clouds in the big sky in the even bigger - can you describe the indescribable? - infinite. It never ends, therefore it never begins. There's no closure ahead, just more and more and more. We're on a transformative one-way trip. The meat-grinder of soul. Churning, churning, churning. Spitting out spatter. Lifting up dust. Flattening creases. Creasing flats. Sparsely dense worlds inhabit Hounds of Love. Heavily atmospheric. Vast. Sweetly stern; full of guiding fists. 

The smooth sails of "Cloudbusting" are a joyous matter. Free of burden. Floating over the world. On the edge of greatness. Your Sun's coming out....

"Under Ice", as the name would suggest, brings with it a chilly essence. Having taken a sour turn, strings feel a lot heavier. Seedier. Bush's vocals hint at nervousness. "There's something moving under". The vocal delivery of the "other" Bush is pure Evil. The witch is waking. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. The detective-theme-tune-like energy housed in "Waking the Witch" is a shot in the arm of Hounds of Love. It injects a sense of urgency. Someone's missing and they will. be. found. Red-red-roses will be spilled. The hunt is on. There's a ghost in our home watching you without me. I'm not here. I'm not here. I'm not here. Reversed vocals always bring with them an air of sinister. 

"Hello Earth"'s eerie ending leads into the new day of "The Morning Fog". The contrast between the end and the beginning is of stark contrast. A tip of the hat towards life?