Caught in the Carousel

Kate Bush

50 Words for Snow
Anti

Kate Bush

For a week or so this past November, I was flush in a joy of ignorance. I didn't know, you see, that the vocals in "Snowflake," the opening track of Kate Bush's new album, were not hers. The voice had a new dimension to it that knocked on the listener's lungs; it was there to take your breath away for a bit. I would soon learn, however, that the vocals that rendered me a bit dizzy, were courtesy of Bush's son Albert. This knowledge did nothing to pull me away from the song. His vocals are his mother's vocals with just a touch of an emerging masculinity that will soon be a vital part of the boy's everyday being, when he becomes a man and falls away from the loving mother. Soon enough, though, Kate Bush's voice comes in from the skies, singing to the falling-away snowflake: "The world is so wide/Keep falling/I'll find you."

Depending where you stand on Kate Bush, the idea of the opening track on her first album of new material in over five years being about anthropomorphized snowflakes either has you rolling your eyes or sitting upright in full attention. The latter reader needs no further info (in fact he may have already left the room in search of the album). But for the fan of music who has never warmed to Kate Bush, trust me: the mother/son duet is the first masterstroke in an utterly unexpected and thrilling symphonic tour de force. 50 Words for Snow is a jazz-informed romance; a love affair with the weather and the vagaries of fate; it's a record rich with legend and thick with heart.

Almost every turn of the record is a thrill. The chamber openings of "Lake Tahoe" would never lead you to expect an eleven-minute tear-jerker of an adored-dog's return home. Recovering from that perplexity you might hope to find comfort in the smoldering-titled "Misty," only to find yourself stopping the track, going back a bit because, wait, is she...I mean...Come on, this is not about a night of passion with a snowman. Well why not? Because that is precisely what it's about. When it comes to flights of fancy, no one's passport is as fat as Kate Bush's.

There is not a wrong turn on this record (unless you count the accompanying "artwork"). A restrained and powerful guest appearance by Elton John gives genuine feeling to "Snowed In At Wheeler Street," a love song about two ethereal spirits finally crystallizing in the knowledge that they've been lovers for all of history, and now this one last storm has forced them to stay indoors, incapable of fleeing the dangers of their hearts.

If there is a mellow side to the jazzy inflections of most of the tracks. "Wild Man" comes at album's center and reminds any real Bushie of The Dreaming or Hounds of Love. And it does so with all the conviction that the final track, the unfortunately-titled "Among Angels" reminds the listener of "The Coral Room," from her 2005 masterpiece Aerial. That song so specific to her dead mother, managed to be about all motherhoods. It was a reminder of Camus' notion that "motherhood, you see, is humanity itself." Where "The Coral Room" ached with the specifics of her mother's little brown jug, falling, shattering, in the dead woman's kitchen, "Among Angels" is vague in terms of its demographics of loss. But from the very first line, it's clear that Bush might go into a hibernation now that this album is in the can. The voice lifts on that line's last word before gamely fighting off the tatters coming to lay claim. If the raw emotion of the song (at just under seven minutes, it's the album's shortest track), doesn't melt whatever jangle of ice might still be in your veins, then this album, this very life, is not for you.

That an album so seemingly constrained by a thematic requirement is in fact one of the most liberating artistic achievements in recent musical history is all the hope any season might need.

—Thomas Cooney