So Bush and her romantic partner/bassist Del Palmer abandoned London for a 17th-century farmhouse, spent the summer gardening, and built a 48-track studio in her family barn where she doubled down on the Fairlight CMI, the pioneering digital sampling synthesizer that ruled The Dreaming. and Siouxsie and the Banshees, not early Sheena Easton, and sold far less than its predecessors. Raging and experimental, it was akin to Public Image Ltd. Thanks to MTV, UK pop had exploded in worldwide popularity since The Dreaming, her self-produced record that EMI nearly returned for lacking potential singles its only hit, “Sat in Your Lap,” was 15 months old by the time the album finally reached stores in 1982. Despite her overnight success, she would never conform to conventional stardom: Instead, she reversed the usual rock ‘n’ roll process where once-provocative artists cave to commercial pressure and shake off the quirks that initially made them distinct: Maturity would only make Bush more daring.īut by 1985, the year of Hounds of Love, she needed to reaffirm her appeal. She exuded brains and beauty and suffused both with an unyielding otherness that made her an LGBT icon and spiked her international cult with aliens of every stripe, from African-American bohos like Prince and OutKast to Johnny Rotten. “There’s room for a life in your womb, woman,” she crooned with the earnestness of a Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival radical, and did so while much of Europe was watching. since Abbey Road, and it's pretty plain that Bush listened to (and learned from) a lot of the Beatles' output in her youth.On this and ‘78’s follow-up Lionheart, Bush sang fearlessly of religion, incest, murder, homosexuality, and much more. Indeed, this reviewer hadn't had so much fun and such a challenge listening to a new album from the U.K. That vastly divergent grasp, from the minutiae of each song to the broad sweeping arc of the two suites, all heavily ornamented with layered instrumentation, makes this record wonderfully overpowering as a piece of pop music.
![hounds of love album art hounds of love album art](https://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0000/802/MI0000802832.jpg)
In some respects, this was also Bush's first fully realized album, done completely on her own terms, made entirely at her own 48-track home studio, to her schedule and preferences, and delivered whole to EMI as a finished work that history is important, helping to explain the sheer presence of the album's most striking element - the spirit of experimentation at every turn, in the little details of the sound.
![hounds of love album art hounds of love album art](https://www.covercentury.com/covers/audio/k/Kate%20Bush_-_Hounds%20of%20love%20-%20front-inside.jpg)
![hounds of love album art hounds of love album art](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61LbMcvODmL._SY355_.jpg)
If this sounds like heady stuff, it could be, but Bush never lets the material get too far from its pop trappings and purpose. But Hounds of Love was more carefully crafted as a pop record, and it abounded in memorable melodies and arrangements, the latter reflecting idioms ranging from orchestrated progressive pop to high-wattage traditional folk and at the center of it all was Bush in the best album-length vocal performance of her career, extending her range and also drawing expressiveness from deep inside of herself, so much so that one almost feels as though he's eavesdropping at moments during "Running Up That Hill." Hounds of Love is actually a two-part album (the two sides of the original LP release being the now-lost natural dividing line), consisting of the suites "Hounds of Love" and "The Ninth Wave." The former is steeped in lyrical and sonic sensuality that tends to wash over the listener, while the latter is about the experiences of birth and rebirth. Kate Bush's strongest album to date also marked her breakthrough into the American charts, and yielded a set of dazzling videos as well as an enviable body of hits, spearheaded by "Running Up That Hill," her biggest single since "Wuthering Heights." Strangely enough, Hounds of Love was no less complicated in its structure, imagery, and extra-musical references (even lifting a line of dialogue from Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon for the intro of the title song) than The Dreaming, which had been roundly criticized for being too ambitious and complex.