Kate Bush

Still a precocious, coddled child at twenty-seven, Kate Bush loses herself in daydreams and
then turns them into songs. This can take some time: Hounds of Love is her first LP in three
years, and the textural detail suggests she was working the whole time. Since the album
was planned as part of a video project, Bush's wide-screen composing and producing style
and the vivid instrumental support make her Carrollian carols seem like a movie s... More >

Just as her music says she hopes everyone does, I respect and like this woman. Though it's tempting to slot her with Laura Nyro, you never get the sense she's a fool--she's more circa-Hejira Joni Mitchell. Her best songs can't match their best, but sonically she's magnificent, out-stripping her art-rock mentors, and it would be churlish to deny her to audiophiles and/or young women seeking independent role models. Nevertheless, to be a Romantic with a capital R in 1986 is to be a Victorian like Tennyson, who provides Bush her epigraph. It is deliberately to cultivate a sensibility whose time you know perfectly well has passed. (Grade: B)