Hounds of Love

Kate Bush | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Original Release Date: 1985
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Capitol
• ASIN: B000002U9E
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (193 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,703 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #79 in Music > Alternative Rock > British Alternative > General

Track Listings

1. Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)

2. Hounds Of Love

3. The Big Sky

4. Mother Stands For Comfort

5. Cloudbusting

6. And Dream Of Sheep

7. Under Ice

8. Waking The Witch

9. Watching You Without Me

10. Jig Of Life

11. Hello Earth

12. The Morning Fog

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Few women have expanded the vocabulary of rock as bewitchingly as Kate Bush; among male stars, only Prince may have taken as many risks. Hounds of Love saw Bush reining in the kookier aspects of The Dreaming, channelling them into epic electro-pop that tackled big issues of life and death and God with gripping drama and intensity. "Running Up That Hill" was one of the great singles of the '80s; "Cloudbusting" was string-driven, magically pretty; "Jig of Life" showed that Bush is one of the few pop artists who can flirt with Celtic mysticism without sounding twee or trite. Forget the riot grrrls: Bush is the real thing. --Barney Hoskyns

Product Description

CD Album

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the truly great eighties albums March 4, 2004

By [e-mail]

Format:Audio CD

"Hounds of Love" is the best Kate Bush album, her most successful, and yet it may be her least accessible. Certainly it contains a much wider musical range than most albums in 1985, what with the drums, guitars and pianos, followed by the bouzoukis, fiddles, uillean pipes, cellos and balalaikas. The album also has a wide range of allusion. Not only does it include a clip from "The Wall," but it also makes reference to Tennyson and Reich. Even more amazingly it actually make the portentous imperialist and the pseudo-scientific quack sympathetic and aesthetically successful. It starts off with the unusual love song "Running up that Hill," ("I'd make a deal with God/And get him to swap our places"). The video consists of a strange, intimate pair of dancers, which slowly spirals out of the attic where they are dancing to a strange foreign runway. "The Hounds of Love" is next and it is probably the song I care about the least. But then there is the joyful cheeriness of "The Big Sky." Then there is the carefully understated "Mother Stands for Comfort," ("She knows that I've been doing something wrong/But she won't say anything.") "Cloudbusting," one of Kate Bush's triumphs, refers to William Reich and his crackpot belief that by manipulating "orgone energy" (energy from orgasms) he could make it rain. Yet the song is a moving success, with its cello-driven melody, notwithstanding the fact that in both the song and the video Bush is playing a boy. ("Ooh I just know that something good is going to happen/And I don't know when/But just saying it could even make it happen.")

Then there is the second side, "The Ninth Wave." The songs are all clearly different from each other, in style and tempo and instrumentation, and they discuss such subjects as sleeping, ice-skating, witch-hunts, ghosts, Irish jigs, the evening and a statement of love. But they are all united in their theme about a drowning woman. It starts off with the apparently soft and increasingly sinister "And Dream of Sheep." ("Like poppies, heavy with seed/They take me deeper and deeper"). Then there is the short, effective and quite chilling violin driven "Under Ice." The dramatic "Waking the Witch" follows, where Bush is confronted by a demonic inquisitor and which contains the aforementioned Pink Floyd reference, a forceful drumbeat as well as a brief sequence of bells. But the best cut is "Watching you Without Me," about the strange ghostlike presence, which is my favourite Kate Bush song of all. Here her voice, singing relatively understated material, shows off its true power and nuance. Then there is "Jig of Life" as well as "Hello Earth." The latter is the longest song on the album, as it starts off with childish innocence (Hello Earth/With just one hand help up high/I can blot you out,) and then moves on to a threatening storm. Finally there is "The Morning Fog," with its simple melody, relatively simple arrangement and genuine expression of love for her family. (The 1998 CD includes six other songs, including remixes of "Running up that Hill" and "The Big Sky." The four unreleased songs are all good, though they do not cohere with the original album. The best of them is "Burning Bridge.")

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Kate Bush at Her Artistic and Commercial Apex January 6, 2002

By Gary F. Taylor HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Audio CD

At first listening, HOUNDS OF LOVE would seem to have little in common with Kate Bush's previous work; in some ways, however, it is a logical extension, for throughout her earlier work she had increasingly fused unlikely instruments with synthesizers while gradually leaving behind certain vocal affectations. For HOUNDS OF LOVE she would repeat this, fusing distinctly Irish-sounding instruments with synthesizers while continuing to downplay her extraordinary range to create a remarkably clean yet multi-layered sound that serves her material remarkably well. At the same time, she worked her penchant for macabre and bizarre imagery into a much more subtle idiom. The resulting HOUNDS OF LOVE seems, to me at least, like a combination of the melodic delicacy of her earliest recordings with the raw power of her immediately previous THE DREAMING.

HOUNDS OF LOVE breaks into two distinctly separate yet stylistically similar parts, and it is a tribute to Bush's talents that she was able to unify these portions in such a way as to make them obviously different in content without making them feel separate in tone. The first half of the recording-"Running Up That Hill," "Hounds of Love," "Big Sky," "Mother Stands For Comfort," and "Cloudbusting"-are at once independent of each other yet distinctly of the same album, raveling the same musical and lyrical thread. The second half-"And Dream of Sheep," "Under Ice," "Waking the Witch," "Watching You Without Me," "Jig of Life," and "Hello Earth"-are more in the line of a single recording from which the individual titles cannot be easily separated. In these selections, she seems to be telling a story of her dreamlife, capturing the beautiful and fearsome images that come to her in sleep and then awakening to face the new day with the concluding "Morning Fog." Throughout the recording, Bush seems considerably less interested in vocal gymnastics than in the past-although "Big Sky" and "Waking The Witch" certainly make good use of her remarkable talents in that direction. Her voice is full, rich, and sure, and her bursts into extreme displays of range seem less a matter of showmanship than of artistic inevitability. This is Kate Bush shorn of her eccentricities, and she is every bit as remarkable without them as she was when she gave them full play.

Although Bush has always been extremely well regarded in England and in Europe, she was not widely known in the United States, where her recordings were deemed too alternative for the mass market. With HOUNDS OF LOVE, however, she made a perfect leap into American commercial success, creating a more popular sound without sacrificing any of her uniqueness in the process. It was and remains a remarkable feat, and even some fifteen years after its release HOUNDS OF LOVE remains as fresh and as compelling as the first day it was recorded. A powerful statement by a truly gifted artist, highly recommended.

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hounds of Love is Kate's best studio album. Arf! September 26, 2001

By Daniel J. Hamlow HALL OF FAME

Format:Audio CD

Kate Bush's fifth studio album was accused of being more accessible to the general public. While not as wonderfully bizarre as its predecessor, The Dreaming, Hounds Of Love not only proved she still had what it took, but had her develop a concept album for the latter seven songs.

The first half, Hounds Of Love, is basically most of the singles. "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" It's that chorus, where's she's "runnin' up that road/runnin' up that hill/with no problem", which makes me wonder what the angels Damiel and Cassiel from Wings Of Desire would think. Would Kate accept a compromise trade, where she would trade places and become an angel instead of God?

"The Big Sky" is a big yes to all those introspective, inwardly directed "extraterrestrial" cloudgazers who say, "that cloud looks like such and such" instead of literalists who say "that cloud looks like a bunch of suspended rain and ice particles." I always liked Kate because she was in her own Bush universe and who cares if no one understood her songs?

"Cloudbusting" is my favorite single from here, especially with its regimental rhythms of the synthesizers.

It is the Ninth Wave portion of this album that is intriguing. The series of seven songs portray the saga of a drowning woman. Now, how she manages the transition from the insomniac state of "And Dream Of Sheep" to "Under Ice", I'm not sure. Presumably, the radio doesn't help, so she goes outside to skate in order to work herself to a goodnight's sleep.

The action happens in "Under Ice", which begins with her skating, "cutting lines in the ice", spitting snow. In the last verse, she sings of something trying to come up, and guess what? It's her! She's fallen through the thin ice.

"Waking The Witch" is her struggle to stay awake in the freezing water, and a cacophony of her memories past and present, as well as her subconscious, interwoven with an ominous voice of an inquisitor that pronounces her guilty as a witch. As she sinks, there comes the blades of a helicopter, courtesy of Pink Floyd, indicates the Rescue Services.

It seems that in "Watching You Without Me", the woman's spirit has left her and she is a "ghost in the hall", watching her worried husband watching "the clock move the slow hand". The ghost's communicating to her husband is translated by chopped up, staccato dialogue.

Next up, the engaging Irish "Jig Of Life", which deals with efforts to resuscitate her.

The sounds of air chatter indicates that the woman's chances for survival is touch and go, as her spirit hovers above the world of senses and into outer space so she says "Hello Earth". She has an angelic perspective ("with just one hand/held up high/I can blot you out of sight/Peek-a-boo, little Earth") and it looks like she tries to save a ship of sailors from being deluged by a storm at sea. The low-register chant that sounds the second time might be angels she summoned. Once calm, she, or the head of the angels whispers, "Go to sleep, little Earth." She has helped save the sailors, and is transported back to her body.

The series ends with the chirpy "The Morning Fog", which is a celebration of life and the people in one's life. The woman has survived, and all is well again. Or did she wake up from a dream?

That's the thing I'm left wondering: did she actually fall into the icy lake, or did she have a DREAM of falling into that lake? Much of this septet is subject to interpretation, and mine is no exception.