Ugh

So, you may or may not know that I love Kate Bush. Love. I’ve learned the choreography from her video clips, trawled record stores for old vinyl singles. (This was in the olden days, before Limewire and iTunes made finding b-sides easy.)I’ve written essays on her, read books on her.

However, I understand why some people don’t. One friend described her work as “exhausting”, and it’s pretty apt: with her art school aesthetic, her busy sonic production, her earnest lyrics, she can come off like an irritatingly precocious teenager. But I think she’s brilliant. I read an article today which described Kraftwerk as having “basically invented the future”. That’s quite an apt description, but I think Kate Bush really saw where things were going. While Kraftwerk and the New Romantics who followed were busy fiddling with synthesisers and drum machines, Bush was merging computer-generated music with organic sounds. She stretched traditional instruments like piano and even her voice to their extremes, foreseeing the way pop music would evolve after the plasticity of the 1980s faded away.

Anyway, nowhere was her vision of the future more apparent than on Deeper Understanding a track from her 1989 album The Sensual World. In that song, the protagonist “turned to [her] computer, like a friend”, predicting the rise of the MySpace generation. Now, Deeper Understanding is the first single from the forthcoming Director’s Cut, an album on which Bush recontextualises songs from The Sensual World and its follow-up The Red Shoes, while keeping elements of the original recording. I approached this project with caution: Bush has never been one for looking back, and these two albums are probably the weakest in her ouvre. That said, they’re also the most in need of an overhaul.

So here’s the new Deeper Understanding.

If you listened to it, you will be aware that it is terrible.

In 1985, Bush rerecorded her hit 1978 single, Wuthering Heights, because its production sounded dated, and yet here, she inexplicably keeps that elastic 1980s bassline. She’s also kept the dial-tone of a modem, a long-dead sound in the mix, and added bursts of static, a remnant of analogue technologies. Catch up, woman; it’s the twenty-first century!

Bush used to do incredible things with her voice (on one of my favourite tracks, Leave It Open, Bush recorded a phrase, played it backwards, learned to sing it backwards, recorded that and played it backwards, resulting in a very wobbly effect); now, it sounds like she just selected the “underwater” effect on ProTools. She stripped out the otherwordly vocals of the Trio Bulgarka, a Bulgarian folk group she admittedly overused on these albums, and replaced them with a fucking harmonica solo. Her voice sounds haggard, too: of course, her voice has aged (it was beautifully mellow on 2005’s Aerial), but this performance gives none of the charisma we’ve come to expect from her. It sounds like she recorded the song sitting in bed.

So my hopes are low, but any Kate Bush album is better than none at all…right?

N.B. If you haven’t encountered this woman, here she is at her most magical. Ignore the dodgy video clip, and hear the warmth Bush brings to this ballad constructed around nothing but a simple drum pattern and synth line.

Filed under: music