“Hounds of Love” by Leah Kardos Bloomsbury, 152 pp., $14.95
Years ago, I was talking to a co-worker about music and mentioned Kate Bush.
“Never heard any of her music,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You’ve got to be joking! Really? You’ve never heard the jewel of the British music scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s?”
“Nope. She always seems really arty and hard to understand,” he retorted.
I told him to stream Hounds of Love and let me know his thoughts. He said he would. Days later, I asked if he had a chance to hear the album. He did and was completely enthralled by the sonics of the record. He kept saying the album was cinematic, and that her songs—especially ‘The Ninth Wave’—were so movie-like that he really felt he was being taken on a trip.
That’s the thing about this record: it doesn’t take much to draw in the listener, except having an open mind. The unique, auteur-like artistry of Kate Bush was such a breath of fresh air in the ‘80s. Her music wasn’t new wave, pop, or rock. Rather, she created songs that reflected…well, her. Whether one liked Bush’s music or not, it was clear that Kate Bush wrote for Kate Bush. Her vision of what shape and form her music would take would not be influenced by the outside world. What listeners heard in album after album was her interior world; a world where weirdness abounds not only sonically, but lyrically as well. Listen to the predecessor album to Hounds of Love, and what you’ll hear on The Dreaming is both stunning in its beauty at times, but also really strange. But not like Yoko Ono wailing-like-a-dolphin strange, more like a strangeness nestled into a rhythmic groove. If one were to just sample the title track “The Dreaming,” “Sat In Your Lap,” or even “Get Out Of My House” (donkey braying and all), you’ll get more than a sense of what I’m talking about.
So it comes as no surprise that Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love would get the 33 1/3 treatment. By that, I mean a compact monograph, published by Bloomsbury Academic in November 2024, extolling the excellence of the record. Leah Kardos, a lecturer at Kingston University in London, England, is not only an academic, she’s also a musician. Her music is nothing like Kate Bush’s compositions; she is much more rooted in a kind of classical ambient sound. But, given that she is an accomplished player and composer, she’s adept at highlighting some of the musical qualities that non-musicians would miss—or not understand—why Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love is such a landmark record. It’s not only the impressive artistry of the record Kardos highlights, but also her enthusiasm for the gear Bush purchased to build out her 48-track home studio at East Wickham Farm in Kent in the early ‘80s. So, if you want to know that she had a Soundcraft 2400 mixing desk, Studer tape machines, AMS speakers, A&D F760X-RS compressor/expanders, and even the same Yamaha CS-80 polysynth that Vangelis used to score Blade Runner, you’ll love Kardos’s catalog of the equipment Bush used to compose and produce the album. If you’re also a fan of Rick Beato and his often music theory-soaked demonstrations of chord progressions, you’ll adore Kardos’s use of words like tonic, flattened 7th, roof of the phrase, or Phrygian modes.
Personally, I found it all very confusing as I am not a musician, but I did appreciate how granular Kardos went into an analysis of the music on Hounds of Love. However, Kardos is not all cold and academic about the album. She does focus on the sexual aspect of Kate Bush’s most popular song, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” by noting that the body swapping isn’t only about knowing what it’s like to be a different gender experiencing the world, but also how it feels to penetrate and be penetrated by someone we are in love with and share intimate experiences with.
Side one of the record is about the single songs for the most part. The title track, even with its playful barking, is about running away from the very love that you want. The daydreamy escapism of watching clouds and being wrapped up in her world (and the alienation it sometimes engenders) is contrasted with the musical big fun of “The Big Sky,” a romping tune that has layers of production that sometimes feel a little too thick to discern the individual elements that went into creating this song. “Mother Stands For Comfort” is probably the least interesting track on the record, though Kardos notes that it’s lyrically one of the most interesting because, well, it’s about how a mother’s love for a child doesn’t wane, even when that child is a murderer. “Cloudbusting” is a fantastic song written from the perspective of a child. In this case, the child is Peter Reich, whose father, Wilhelm, had some rather unorthodox views about sex (hey, the guy coined the term “the sexual revolution”), but also created a machine that he claimed could make it rain. Apparently, the dude was charged by the U.S. government with fraud in 1956, was sentenced to two years in prison, and died from heart failure while incarcerated. Though Wilhelm Reich was a fraud, crank, bullshitter, or whatnot, Bush found Peter Reich’s memoir of his childhood fascinating and wanted to highlight the magic of love—and how that magic can change the physical world around them for the better.
That was side one, which Kardos does a very good song-by-song analysis of. Side two is about ‘The Ninth Wave,’ that album-side trip that’s essentially about a woman lost at sea and dying. In her last moment before it’s either lights out for good or being rescued, she goes under the water and is trapped like a skater who falls through the ice. She then wakes up in some kind of realm where she’s judged a witch, while a helicopter floats overhead with someone instructing her to get out of the water. The drama fades, and she reappears as a ghost in her home, visits her family for a bit, and then transports to a Ren Faire-type place where she meets herself as an old woman who implores her to let her live. She floats above the earth only to descend back to her home where she sees her family and is overcome with the emotional toll of her trip, telling them over and over how much she loves them.
It’s kind of Wizard of Oz-ish in its narrative construction, but it’s also a fantastic sonic journey where Bush used all that studio gear and creative energy to take the listener on. Hounds of Love is quite the masterpiece from the art rock genre, and the record stands apart from anything that Bush’s British contemporaries were creating in the 80s—save perhaps for Peter Gabriel.
For those music fans in the United States at the time, Kate Bush was an exotic import, a weirdly wonderful musician whose songs were more than left of center and appealed to a certain type of contrarian in the Age of Ronald Reagan. Perhaps that’s why she was never that popular in the States. Quirky like Cyndi Lauper or Talking Heads was fairly safe because the spectacle of the Big Suit or the neon colors tended to fit into their relatively radio-friendly songs. Bush? Yeah, she was full-on weird in that she, like David Lynch or David Bowie (in the ’70s), created worlds and characters that didn’t seem to be from this world. That kind of weirdness didn’t sell much product at the shopping malls in America, so Bush remained a niche artist whose brilliance remained appreciated by a small sector of fans who either felt her music spoke to their experiences or those, like me, who just loved the musical journey she took me on. Leah Kardos’s Hounds of Love does at times capture those moments in her book. However, she sometimes gets mired in music theory to the point where her analysis feels so technical that it’s easy for the layperson to get lost. Still, for those who want to know why Hounds of Love is a great album, they just have to listen to it first. If, after getting caught up in its magic, supplementing listens with Kardos’s book will take you, um, deeper and deeper into Kate Bush’s career, artists who she inspired, what went into the making of her iconic album, and its aftermath in terms of Bush performing much of the album live during her 2014 residency at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, England.
Comments