Kate Bush Aerial CD

Personnel: Kate Bush (piano, keyboards); Kate Bush; Booty Wood, Michael Wood (vocals); Eligio Quinteiro (guitar); Danny McIntosh, Dan McIntosh (acoustic guitar, electric guitar); Richard Campbell, Susanna Pell, Richard Campbell, Susanna Pell (viol); Chris Hall, Chris Hall (accordion); Gary Brooker (Hammond b-3 organ, background vocals); Del Palmer, Eberhard Weber, John Giblin (bass guitar); Steve Sanger (drums); Bosco D'Oliveira, Robin Jeffrey (percussion); Paddy Bush, Paddy Bush (background vocals); Rolf Harris (didjeridu); Peter Erskine, Stuart Elliott (drums); Lol Creme (background vocals); Bertie.
Audio Mixer: Del Palmer.
Publisher: Kate Bush.
Since the 1980s Kate Bush has shouldered the unhappy burden of having to live up to her own brilliance: albums like THE DREAMING and HOUNDS OF LOVE set a high watermark for shimmering, adventurous, off-kilter pop. In the 12 years that transpired between the releases of 1993's THE RED SHOES and 2005's AERIAL, expectations ran high that Bush had something monumental in store. AERIAL does not necessarily meet those expectations, but that is not to imply that it's a lackluster release either.
A double-disc set that encompasses a collection of songs about domesticity (the first disc, A SEA OF HONEY) and a conceptual suite that details the passing of a day (the second disc, A SKY OF HONEY), AERIAL is ambitious, lovely, intensely personal, and marked by Bush's unique approach to music-making. The fierce edginess of THE DREAMING-era Bush is replaced by deep meditations on family life ("Bertie"), familiar chores ("Mrs. Bartolozzi"), and the cycles of time ("Sunset"). Bush's gentle singer/songwriter mode is combined with jazz, rock, classical, electronica, and other elements for a musical experience that sustains her reputation as one our most adventurous and distinctive artists.
Fierce Kate Bush fans who are expecting revelation in Aerial, her first new work since The Red Shoes in 1993, will no doubt scour lyrics, instrumental trills, and interludes until they find them. For everyone else, those who purchased much of Bush's earlier catalog because of its depth, quality, and vision, Aerial will sound exactly like what it is, a new Kate Bush record: full of her obsessions, lushly romantic paeans to things mundane and cosmic, and her ability to add dimension and transfer emotion though song. The set is spread over two discs. The first, A Sea of Honey, is a collection of songs, arranged for everything from full-on rock band to solo piano. The second, A Sky of Honey, is a conceptual suite. It was produced by Bush with engineering and mixing by longtime collaborator Del Palmer.
A Sea of Honey is a deeply interior look at domesticity, with the exception of its opening track, "King of the Mountain," the first single and video. Bush does an acceptable impersonation of Elvis Presley in which she examines his past life on earth and present incarnation as spectral enigma. Juxtaposing the Elvis myth, Wagnerian mystery, and the image of Rosebud, the sled from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Bush's synthesizer, sequencer, and voice weigh in ethereally from the margins before a full-on rock band playing edgy and funky reggae enters on the second verse. Wind whispers and then howls across the cut's backdrop as she searches for the rainbow body of the disappeared one through his clothes and the tabloid tales of his apocryphal sightings, looking for a certain resurrection of his physical body. The rest of the disc focuses on more interior and domestic matters, but it's no less startling. A tune called "Pi" looks at a mathematician's poetic and romantic love of numbers. "Bertie" is a hymn to her son orchestrated by piano, Renaissance guitar, percussion, and viols.
But disc one's strangest and most lovely moment is in "Mrs. Bartolozzi," scored for piano and voice. It revives Bush's obsessive eroticism through an ordinary woman's ecstatic experience of cleaning after a rainstorm, and placing the cRolling Stone (No. 987, p.130) - 4 out of 5 stars - "...Given Bush's protracted absence, the subtlety of her eighth studio offering seems particularly ballsy...."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.96) - 5 stars out of 5 - "Kate Bush is the greatest living British artist in song and this is her masterpiece....It's all exquisitely sung, played and judged....And so few artists award themselves the freedom to roam around their imagination the way Kate Bush does."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.58) - Ranked #3 in Mojo's "The 50 Best Albums Of 2005" - "[D]aring conceits, emotional nudism and neo-classical sonics culminated in a mood-altering crypto-Balearic trance-athon."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.61) - Ranked #45 in Mojo's "100 Modern Classics" -- "[A] filmic vision rendered in sound that demanded the listener's undivided attention..."