Caught in the Carousel

Kate Bush

Director's Cut
Fish People

Kate Bush

Just as one wouldn't stand in a McDonald's, scouring the menu board for the duck breast in a fig reduction sauce, one can't ever encounter a new Kate Bush album and think: Yup, just what I expected.

Six years after delivering the astonishing masterpiece long expected of her, Aerial, Bush has just released the coyly-titled Director's Cut, an album of eleven songs culled from her 1989 and 1993 albums The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Bush is quoted as saying: "For some time I have felt that I wanted to revisit tracks from these two albums and that they would benefit from having new life breathed into them...I think of this as a new album."

The Red Shoes remains Bush's least successful effort, artistically speaking. It suffered at the time from guest-artist-syndrome (Kate Bush and Prince together for the first time!). The album also contains, however, some of Bush's best work: "Song of Solomon," "Lily," "Moments of Pleasure," and, above all, "Top of the City." Perhaps resituating these songs in an album that shares space with work from one of Bush's great albums (The Sensual World) would anchor them in a more appropriate milieu. In fact, this time around, only "Lily" is a mistake, with Bush foregoing the prog-Rock elements of the original and funking it up to utterly baffling results. The other tracks all have flashes of improvements over the originals (when she gets rough around the edges of "Top of the City" it's an unexpected rush) but they are also too similar to the originals. It's as if you had a friend who wanted to hear "Song of Solomon"—you wouldn't have to ask which version. Both are strong and engaging.

When it comes to the four tracks from The Sensual World there is a lot more at stake. "Flower of the Mountain," is what once was "The Sensual World" (the change in title coming from the fact that, unlike as in 1989, the James Joyce estate gave Bush the right to use direct text from Ulysses). It was one of the lesser-engaging works in its original eponymous version, and it is similarly vague here.

The greatest artists are often prophets: Consider Leonard Cohen in 1990: "There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code/your private life will suddenly explode." Or Graham Greene's late-1950s spot-on prediction that the United States will create a false reason to enter into a war in Indochina. Add to those giants, this from Kate Bush's "Closer Understanding" in 1989: "As the people here grow colder, I turn to my computer and spend my evenings with it like a friend...Well I've never known such pleasure...I did not eat, I did not sleep, the intensity increasing, till my family found me and intervened." I think we all have a friend or two on Facebook who Bush somehow envisioned those twenty years ago. The 1989 version had a very strange approach to the computer's voice. It's not the sterile voice of Hal we all know from 2001. It was a haunting trio of Bulgarian folk singers. The result was immediately arresting. This time around, the voice of the computer is the vocoder used by just about every single pop musician recording today. Fake, deceptive, insincere. The 2011 "Deeper Understanding" has Bush scat a bit with the vocoder until the rescue comes in the form of the Trio Bulgarka. It's a bold, utterly successful call.

One is being slightly cheeky in reporting that Bush covers that Maxwell ballad, "This Woman's Work." There is a reason why the Maxwell version is better known (and, frankly, more loved) than the original Kate Bush version: the vocals. Bush has always seemed a little shrill on this song. And, as if of the same mind, she starts this new version with warm tones better suited to a Lou Rawls or Bill Withers fireplace serenade. The scene set, Bush's voice arrives. Honeyed yet raw; strong while utterly vulnerable; full of beauty and despair. If the final note had been struck at 5:42, it might have made Maxwell's version redundant; the slow exit of the ensuing 45 seconds, however, takes some of the punch out and saves the need for the Maxwell version.

So what then of the album as a whole? In "Never Be Mine," Bush sings: "the smell of burning fields/will now mean you and here." We often associate music (as one does smells) with a time in our lives. A massive pop hit can be a soundtrack for an entire generation's certain summer. And therein lies the frustrating aspect of this album: Bush fans know these songs so well, have spent two decades with them, so it's hard for the songs to situate themselves in the frontal part of the brain's music receptors. One has to make a conscious decision to pull out that new twenty-year-old song. And that's unfortunate because there is such artistry at work here.

In the 2011 version of "Never Be Mine" the line that resonates with the listener doesn't involve the future of summonsed-memories, but rather the past tense of the opening line: "I look at you and see/My life that might have been..." The wisdom Bush displays by allowing the voice to sound tired, reminds us that in the end, with Director's Cut, she has given us a document of twenty years in the life of arguably the most important female musician of our time.

—Thomas Cooney