Category: 50 Words for Snow Page 9 of 12

Josh Hurst is loving it:

“The album is, in a sense, about snow as a symbolic, physical, historic, mythological, and sensual thing. It considers snow as an idea, and as a tangible object in a physical universe. What this means, I think, is that this is the strangest and most erotic holiday album of all time. I’m half joking—there is only one mention of Christmas here—but half not. The wintery mood here is unshakable, the unwavering focus utterly enthralling. This is a sublime album made of seven extraordinary songs, and it offers true delights of poetry and play that no one but Kate Bush could have devised. Poetry and play—yes, those are the twin engines here; the long running time of these songs, and their fanciful approximation of snow, suggests that Bush is almost lost in her own world, letting her own imagination run away with her … 50 Words for Snow is a true marvel, an album that teases with layers of meaning and a steady stream of ideas but never allows for easy summary. It is evocative, but elusive, and its joys come not in pinning it down but in allowing it to dance in front of you, all of its playful poetry and ravishing romance on display...”

7/10 from Olivia Schaff at The Music Fix who plainly doesn’t like Sir Elton John:

“Most of us love snow, long for it, and when the first shy flakes begin to fall we run outside and laugh and play as if we were all eight years old again. Then after a bit the stuff turns brown and slushy, it’s hard to get around in, your car slides around in the road, and it swiftly loses the fun factor. 50 Words For Snow is an incredibly apt title for this work. Kate Bush plays by nobody’s rules but her own. We have seen this in her earlier work … her eccentricities both a blessing and a curse … The album is like looking into a magnificent snow globe that you shake and suddenly the people inside spring to life … No doubt most will gladly overlook the snowdrifts that mar what is otherwise a sometime lovely album, overjoyed that she has graced us with her magical presence once again.”

Simon at Higher Plains Music listens again and again:

“50 Words For Snow did not hit me on first listen aside from the single and the title track. Everything else is very long-winded and although it’s full of wisdom and emotion, it lacks the immediate punch to hook you. My interest was more than piqued however and I wanted to go back and rediscover the songs again that I didn’t immediately want to place on repeat. Suddenly like sections in the songs made sense, they formed songs within songs. Then it clicks. Like Aerial, its one that you need to sit through from start to finish to completely appreciate. On their own, the tracks are beautiful, together, they weave a season of winter chills, hearty spills and the warmth of music and language combined in one of the best examples I’ve heard for a winter album.”

Ben Zimmer on Language Log enjoys Kate’s use of language in the title track of the album:

“Last month, in the post “‘Words for snow’ watch,” I reported that Kate Bush’s new album (out Nov. 21) is called 50 Words for Snow. I wrote, “It’s unclear at this point exactly how Eskimos will figure into Bush’s songwriting, but it’s safe to say they’ll be in there somewhere.” Today, thanks to NPR’s stream of the album, I’ve listened to the ethereal title track, and the Eskimos are indeed in there, but perhaps not in the way you’d expect …“

4 -Star album of the week from Cameron Adams at Adelaide Now:

“It’s classic Kate Bush – a wintry, glacial concept album with seven songs, 65 minutes and zero concession to 2012…most unexpected is the wonderful Snowed in on Wheeler Street…Among Angels, just Bush and a piano and a sprinkling of strings, is stunning…the title track is Bush at her literal best…Lady Gaga has a long way to go before she ever reaches Bush’s effortless levels of unique artistry, and as ever, somewhere Tori Amos is weeping into her piano because, try as she might, no one thinks like Kate Bush.”

9/10 from Andrzej Lukowski at Drowned in Sound:

“Here she delves monomaniacally into snow and the winter – its mythology, its romance, its darkness, its rhythmic frenzy and glacial creep. 50 Words for Snow is artic and hoare frost and robin red breast, sleepy snowscapes and death on the mountain, drifts in the Home Counties and gales through Alaska. But it is mostly, I think, a record about how the fleeting elusiveness of snow mirrors that of love; and if I’m off the mark there, then certainly as a work of music one can view it as a sort of frozen negative to Aerial’s A Sky of Honey…the first three songs clock in at over half an hour and comprise the starkest, most difficult and in some ways most beautiful passage of music in Bush’s career. Based on minimal, faltering piano and great yawning chasms of silence, these tracks mirror the eerie calm of soft, implacable snowfall and winter’s dark…it’s also about Bush’s formidable production skills, her precise, nagging synths and total mastery of studio as instrument…in the 26 years since Hounds of Love, Aerial and 50 Words for Snow have been her only truly fully realised albums. Kate Bush is more than fallible; but at peak she is incomparable.”

Enchanted review from Ryan Reed at Paste Magazine:

“Snow, perhaps in response to the noise that clogs our every waking human moment, is defined by its stirring stillness—the radiating quiet that haunts every ghostly piano drop and evaporating syllable … wintry, unhurried atmosphere defines every second of 50 Words for Snow, Bush’s most striking work since 1989’s The Sensual World. Each track varies only slightly in structure, filled with the same level of sonic craft we’ve come to expect from Bush…” (The album is rated 8.5 out of 10)