Little capsule review from Dylan Terra at Heavy Music:
“The mystical legend of Kate Bush is alive and well … 50 Words For Snow was certainly not rushed in its construction; and while playing, gives off the vibe that it’s in no rush to finish either … master of surreal dreamworlds and real emotion … And like a good storybook, it invites and transfixes with no prior experience needed.”
3.5 stars from Rebecca J Mazur in The Harvard Crimson:
“a uniquely remarkable album, with style, content, and structure at once fascinating and beautiful, yet strange and somewhat inaccessible … comprised almost entirely of abnormally long songs … best be described as minimalist sagas … a larger canvas for artistic expression and experimentation, it also makes it easy to lose track of the song itself, as many of the melodic motifs are repeated for many minutes without much variation … The album requires more focus to fully discern all there is to appreciate in the subtle instrumentation, calmly passionate vocals, and poetic content of the songs. Bush uses the expanded form of her songs to craft products with a tremendous deal of lyrical depth … All are triumphant examples of Bush’s usual creativity in crafting lyrics with wonderful imagery from unique sources of inspiration … Throughout the album there is also an understated sense of humor … Her voice soars at dramatic moments into her upper range in a disconcerting yet powerful dissonance, and then grows low and gravelly with urgency and desperation … a strange album. Its instrumentation is minimalistic, the melodies hard to grasp, and the lyrics often meandering and soulful. But it is also a brilliant compilation that showcases some of Bush’s best creative tendencies. The songs are as much works of art and poetry as they are music, and as such they require patience—patience that absolutely pays off.”
Short interview and album review by Jim Fusilli in the Wall Street Journal:
“When you consider that Kate Bush has gone as long as a dozen years between albums, the appearance of “Director’s Cut” earlier this year and “50 Words for Snow” (Anti) this week is a bonanza. Both discs remind us that Ms. Bush is rarely less than very interesting and often quite superb …”
Short interview with Mike Ragona in the online Huffington Post
Excerpt:
MR: Nice. Could you go into some background on “Misty”?
KB: The thing about that song, aside from having sort of unusual subject matter, is that it’s a very long song–it’s the longest song on the album. I think it runs about 14 minutes. It wasn’t even that I set out to write a song that long, but I was trying to explore the idea of working with longer song structures and moving away from the more traditional form. I wanted to be able to tell the story through a much longer piece of time and so I was able to go through various elements of the story and, hopefully, make the song build. The subject matter is sort of just about a girl who builds a snowman, and later the snowman comes to visit her in her bedroom.
MR: As snowmen often do.
KB: Well, I don’t know about that unless people just keep quiet about it. (laughs)
Nate Chinen reviews the new album for the New York Times here. ““The world is so loud,” murmurs Kate Bush in the first of many disarming choruses on “50 Words for Snow,” her unhurried, utterly self-contained, exquisitely strange new album….if (Director’s Cut) was the effort needed to jostle her into the right frame of mind for “50 Words,” it was worth it. The new album rightly glistens, its sonic parameters set by Ms. Bush’s supple pianism, its lyrics firmly girded by her imagination….the mood is slow and somber but not lugubrious — even when, as on a glacial ghost story like “Lake Tahoe,” there’s real pathos in play”
In my humble opinion one of the best reviews yet from Simon Moore at Live4Ever:
“She’s a storyteller. She was always a storyteller … these songs … are incredible, genre-defying songs, but Bush has never been one for resting on her laurels, so a new sound is necessary … Those little piano flourishes are jazzier, more sustained. That eloquent, silky voice has lost the fanciful swoops and dives of yesteryear; it comes to the front of the mix and gains a whole new poise and vitality … stripping the music down to its core elements … If this is startting to sound overly poetic, then you at least have some idea of what this music does to you. This mellow soundtrack to dark country evenings doesn’t grab you, it creeps and tip-toes up inside your ear and works on you, letting each song grow on you until you can’t help but lose yourself in the whole album … With every listen, this album will reveal another layer, another part of the story you’d never heard before. There’s a lifetime’s worth of listening here. Best get started.”
The Swedish newspaper “Dagens Nyheter” (Todays’ News), featured an interview with Kate, which you can read (in Swedish) here.
Kate started by asking the interviewer how the Swedish winter was. When told that they can be very long, lasting 4-5 months, Kate replied: “Wow, snow for 4-5 months? Good lord! It’s hard to imagine a long winter like that. I hope that doesn’t have a negative impact on what you think of my album” followed by laughter from Kate. Kate is asked if she does most of the producing on her records, the reply was “Yes, even the tea-making”. When asked how she keeps her voice in shape, Kate replies: “I’m not the kind of person who walks around at home singing while cooking and stuff. And I never exercise my voice, maybe I should. I only sing when I make music really.” Download the full translated interview here. Thanks to Jens for sending in the translation.
Tjames Madison at Soundspike is a lover of Kate’s voice:
“Bush remains a singular talent draped in the furs of surreality … It feels like she’s talking about herself by not talking about herself, and why not? The spiky peaks and higher peaks of her youthful chops have been replaced with a sort of smoky mid-range purr, all the better — devoid of much of that voice’s avant garde divisiveness — to examine her role in our modern world as mentor to a bumper crop of spiritual progeny … The instrumentation — Bush accompanying herself with stark, lovely, slightly jazzy piano; the occasional muffled guitar or brushed cymbal or sublimated string section drops in — is gorgeous, and the first half of the wintry song-cycle arrives exactly like its subject, a light, enchanted icefall in near-silence, everyday magic unfolding before your eyes. The tunes wander long and walk softly in this world … But all is not perfect. Elton John’s sudden appearance on “Snowed in on Wheeler Street” feels like an unwelcome intrusion … Fortunately the demure “Among Angels” ends the set back where we started, lost in that haunted, white-dusted graveyard, Bush alone once again with her voice and her piano…”
Album of the week from Tom at Stereogum, a new convert and not the first we’ve heard of since Kate’s new work has been released:
“To this point, I’ve lived a full and happy life without ever much considering the works of Ms. Kate Bush. I knew the singles, sure, and I had a general understanding of her influence on later art-pop spell-weavers … But the singles, with their twisty helium squeals and their non-Euclidean melodies, never convinced me to dig much further. For the most part, Bush has been, for me, one of those canonical blind spots that everyone has. But her new 50 Words For Snow is the sort of album that convinces skeptics like me to go back and reconsider. At first glance, 50 Words For Snow comes waving plenty of red flags of pretentiousness. There’s the butt-ugly cover art. There are the virtually-nonexistent song-structures and the sprawling running times; not a single track dips under six minutes, and most go way longer. There are the loony concepts … But when you actually give into the album’s seductive calm, all these weaknesses (except maybe the cover art) become strengths. Musically, 50 Words For Snow is a spare and delicate album, one that can unfold hazily in the background without demanding your full attention. Instrumentally, it’s arranged to flutter and waft, with its brushstroke drums and its impressionistic splashes of piano and its unobtrusive electronic ripples. Bush’s formidable voice remains in whisper-coo range most of the time, and her simple phrasings are enough to get under your skin. And with her lyrics so deliberately paced-out, it’s easy to forget how specific and absurd those story-songs can be … And once the album sinks in, which it will, even the most far-out ideas start to raise goosebumps. … the theme of ephemeral love slipping away is even more prevalent … Once you let the album in, it’s powerful stuff.“
4 1/2 stars from Siobhan Kane at Consequence of Sound (also featured on the Time Magazine website):
“Using snow as a kind of landscape, it provides a sparse, beautiful, and ultimately pure backdrop for her creativity to soar … “Snowflake” … is a lovely way to start the record. It creates a conversation with mother and son and also with the earth and us, since the song suggests we are of the earth, yet “ice and dust and light”; we are at once flesh and blood, yet ethereal, unknowable. The haunting piano that flutters around the piece creates an emotional fragility, the “midnight of Christmas” McIntosh sings of. “The world is so loud,” Bush sings, so she sets about creating a place of stillness for us to travel to and be transported …“Lake Tahoe” begins with harmonies from tenor and counter tenor Stefan Roberts and Michael Wood that dissolve into a mournful piano composition, with Bush’s yearning, searching vocal … “Misty” is an almost fourteen minute piece of brilliance … The composition twists from a driving rhythmic kind of a song to something akin to spoken word, mixing up a jazz sensibility with a touch of folk, creating an exciting musical space…”
Rolling Stone reports that rapper Big Boi seriously likes Kate’s new album: “The album, to me, is just very somber and very chill,” he says. “Knowing her music and being a fan, it’s very, very deep Kate Bush for me. It’s concentrated. It’s raw emotion. It’s almost like a scene from her diary – she seems to be in love like a motherfucker. Really, really, really in love.” RS reports that Big Boi’s favorite song on the album is Snowed in at Wheeler Street: “It’s like a story between her and the guy, how they were in love from the beginning of time, how they never want to let each other go,” he says.”It just really builds. I think it’s really deep. I dig it…”
The BBC Radio 4 flagship morning news programme Today reported the release of Kate’s new album and included a snippet from the interview with John Wilson broadcast this evening on the flagship arts programme Front Row.
This was soon picked up by Reuters especially Kate’s fears for the current state of the record industry.
Rich Juzwial reviews the new album for The Daily, an iPad newspaper here. “Not since 1982’s “The Dreaming” has Bush been as gloriously goofy as she is on her 10th album, “50 Words for Snow.” On it, she courts a snowflake, covers the tracks of a yeti to keep him safe from scientists and builds a snowman with whom she has an affair. Her duet with Elton John, “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” plays out much like the hilariously clueless audition duet of “Midnight at the Oasis” in “Waiting for Guffman” (“Just two old flames keeping the fire going/ We look so good together,” growls John.) Even loopier is her collaboration with Stephen Fry on the album’s title track, which finds him listing off increasingly unlikely synonyms for snow (“swans-a-melting,” “faloop’njoompoola,” “creaky-creaky,” “Zhivagodamarbletash,” “bad for trains,” “blown from polar fur”) with Bush interrupting intermittently (“Come on man, you got 44 to go!”). If Bush isn’t having a laugh here, she’s at least plowing the way for everyone else.
Unfortunately, “50 Words for Snow” is more fun to think about than it is to listen to. While Bush retains her interest in brushed drums and upright bass that was apparent on “Aerial,” completely new to her aesthetic is an abandonment of pop structure, which is a shame. These seven tracks come in at 65 minutes, and one of them, “Misty,” runs 13 maddeningly chorus-less minutes. Bush’s piano playing is more a drizzle than a flurry: Repetitive themes just trickle out, leaving plenty of space between. The album crystallizes in the middle, finding a more upbeat structure (“Wildman” even has a hook!), but this is Bush at her most musically obtuse.
Listen again below to the Radio 4 interview Kate did with John Wilson on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme. Do not miss if you’re wondering what Kate thinks of the state of the music industry or how a rogue wasp influenced the lyrics of Cloudbusting!
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Kate’s interview today on Canadian Radio with Jian Ghomeshi at 3pm GMT profiled her full career as well as 50 Words For Snow (listen again here OR click here for a free iTunes podcast download of the chat).
Also, an interview Kate did with WDR2 German Radio yesterday evening can be heard again below (thanks Louise and Tom).
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Robert Starr in Austin’s Daily Texan is not impressed:
“Music is a fairly subjective art form. A piece that somebody may love will leave someone else cold. … Kate Bush’s latest release 50 Words for Snow may make good background music for studying, or falling asleep to, but as music to actively listen to, it fails. Tracks drone on and on, sometimes for more than 10 minutes at a time, repeating the same piano riff ad nauseum, with abstract lyrics that may or may not actually mean anything. The title track is especially excessive — it actually lists all the Inuit words for snow … The album is well made, however, and is both atmospheric and moody …the album is pretty, but also incredibly dull and unlikely to have much appeal outside of those who appreciate the avant-garde. It is the work of a true artist who got lost in a cloud of her own expression and forgot that other people need to listen to it. Still, Bush … hasn’t lost the joy that makes her interesting. 50 Words for Snow is not a terribly good album, but it suggests that Bush is still capable of recording a great one. With a slightly increased tempo and better-paced songs, this would have been an easy recommendation. As it stands, it’s a pretentious disappointment.”
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