new introductory bit here.
This is a reviews page based on my own collection, which just keeps growing despite itself. If it isn't listed here, it's because I don't own it yet, or I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Also, bother your local "new rock" radio station and make sure they are playing "new rock" and not "Rock the Casbah," which is not new.
note: entries in red text indicate my pick for the artist's best available album. A gold numeral indicates the POPocalypse winner of the year's best album; second- and third-place winners are in blue. Green lettering indicates an obviously exploitative record company compilation without apparent artist input.
Kate Bush's career, propelled and assisted from time to time by Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour, was one of restless energy and prodigious output that gradually sank away to only occasional releases and a virtual halt to her chart action in the early 90s. Her 1978 debut album has barely aged at all, containing exceptional lyrics, great musicianship, and that voice! Some of the best tracks include "Strange Phenomena" and the #1 single "Wuthering Heights."
Two further albums followed The Kick Inside in short order before what would be the first of her layoffs from the public eye, lasting from Christmas 1980 to the summer of 1982, surfacing only for a minimally-promoted single, "Sat in Your Lap." When she did return with her fourth album The Dreaming, it was to her first poor critical notices, and the record, featuring bizarre vocal exercises and imitations ranging from Cockney to donkey, quickly fell down the charts and neither of the singles used to promote it made the top 40.
Kate subsequently retired for three years before the graceful and powerful Hounds of Love restored her critical and public acceptance over the course of 18 months of activity that culminated in the hits album The Whole Story and its new single "Experiment IV."
In 1989, Kate returned to the charts with The Sensual World, which took Molly Bloom's sexual awakening in the final pages of Joyce's Ulysses as inspiration for an often thrilling emotional opus. Some of the songs had a curious naivety to them (mainly "Deeper Understanding," a song about an affair with a computer which was already awfully dated in 1989), but others were equally as powerful as some of Hounds' finest moments and ensured that, within a few years, a host of emerging artists ranging from Sarah McLachlan to Tori Amos would cite Bush as an influence.
Her final release to date has been 1993's The Red Shoes, an interesting conceptual album released alongside a video called The Line, The Cross and the Curve. More than any previous collection of promo videos by an artist, this gave an overall narrative structure to the music, taking some of prog-rock's more fanciful ideas and visualizing them.
Seven years on, there have been nothing but rumors about new projects from Kate. Unlike her occasional collaborator Peter Gabriel, who has spent the 90s in other public artistic arenas besides music, she has remained out of the public eye, concentrating instead on her family while reportedly continuing to write in semi-retirement.
KATE BUSH: The Whole Story (1986, UK #1, US #76, *)
It's not quite the whole story, but the key points in Kate's UK chart career to 1986 are represnted here in random order. Like a lot of compilations, the music is just fine, but it's damned by crap packaging and assembly by producers who just wanted product and not something that really represents the artist. (You'll see that a lot on this list.)