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50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In the Dreaming, Kate lets the weirdness in full blast, December 15, 2003
Never For Ever was proving ground for Kate Bush's experimental weirdness. Her 1982 followup, The Dreaming, taken after the aboriginal concept of a link to God or heaven, takes that direction to the core and is Kate's most innovative and weirdest (in a great sense) album ever. Weird vocal stylings, clever instrumentation and lyrics characterize this album. The engaging single "Sat In Your Lap" is about someone who's too lazy to work, favoring the ivory tower of the intellectual, but has the misconception that "knowledge something that is sat in your lap." In the end, she sings "I hold a cup of wisdom, But there is nothing within. My cup, she never overfloweth, And 'tis I that moan- and groaneth." "There Goes A Tenner" is about a heist that goes awry, with Kate affecting a slight cockney accent in parts and featuring a music hall-like piano. Throughout there are some male vocal interjections, such as the police and that classic line "What's all this, then?" Funniest lyric: "I hope you remember/To treat the gelignite tenderly for me." "Pull Out The Pin" seems to be about a Vietnamese lying in ambush for an American soldier, ready to pull out the pin and toss the grenade at him. In the chorus, Kate's voice rises to a frenzied pitch when she sings "I love life." The sobriety of the song is underlined: "Just one thing in it/me or him." I don't know what the heck gaffa is, as in "Suspended In Gaffa" and its skipping music-hall piano and a quick one-two-three string waltz, but the girl in there is clearly a timid soul, scared of change, unwilling to be a Pandora. Kate "lets the weirdness in" in "Leave It Open." Her vocals are in many styles, distorted lower register, echoing high-pitched girlish, stretched tape vocals, and wailing. As for the weirdness, the male refrain keeps repeating, "Harm in us, but the power to arm." The droning weird title track is about life in the bush, no, not Kate, but in the Australian desert, where the habits of white man play havoc with nature, be it hitting kangaroos in the land rover or exploiting aborigine land for mineral wealth. "The civilised keep alive/The territorial war./See the light ram through the gaps in the land./Erase the race that claim the place/And say we dig for ore, Or dangle devils in a bottle/And push them from the pull of the bush" demonstrates that "civilizing mission" "Night of the Swallow" is about helping an escaped criminal by a hired plane, the swallow representing freedom. There's some Uileann pipes that give this a Celtic tinge during the refrain. The lonely, one-sided, and reincarnated soul in "All The Love" wants people to love her, but is oblivious to the other people, represented by a young boy singing "We needed you to love us too. We wait for your move." Also present is the observation that dying brings out the grief and love and how she's turned on by the attention. The sighs and multiple phone message machines at the end is an interesting touch. The soft piano ballad "Houdini" and some of the lyrics incorporate the album cover, where Houdini gets the key that'll unbind him from the water tank trick by kissing his assistant, who has the key in her mouth. Her bellowing voice comes in here: "With your spit still on my lip, you hit the water" and there are moments when she wishes he'd drown. When I heard the line "Rosabel believe" I thought it was "Roosevelt bleed" and I thought "What the...?" There is a nice lyrical string section that plays after the bellowing bits. "Get Out Of My House" is a really bizarre one, told from the point of view of a woman with a house analogy incorporated, telling a man to, well... There are some erotic overtones "no stranger's feet will enter me/I wash the panes/I clean the stains" And in line with cleaning of the house, it seems to imply that men make a mess of her life, but there are multiple meanings, as the house also represents her neurotic mental psyche, as it's full of her madness, mistakes, and fight. She screams out the title, and even bellows like a mule (!!!) to demonstrate her stubbornness in not letting anyone in. One of the weirdest but most wonderful from Kate Bush. Even though she seemed to go mainstream in her followup, she continued the innovation of the Dreaming in the concept album portion.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mature, Fearsome, Manic, and Endlessly Fascinating, December 31, 2001
In her first three albums (THE KICK INSIDE, LIONHEART, and NEVER FOREVER) Bush established herself as an etherial-voiced, highly accomplished artist with a penchant for the macabre; in THE DREAMING she suddenly sheds the deliberately adopted artifice of her earlier work and simply explodes as a truly great iconoclastic musician of extraordinary vision with a ferocious passion that would daunt even the likes of American contemporary Patti Smith. The entire album is slickly done in terms of music; the sound, which relies a great deal on percussion and bass lines and synthesizers, is at once as smooth as spit and polish can make it and yet as emotionally raw as a gaping wound. And each track, although extremely diverse in terms of material, feeds into the overwhelming power of the album as a whole.Always attracted to macabre and violent imagery, Bush finally takes off her velvet gloves and reaches directly into some very dark material indeed: the futility of knowledge and the frustration of ambition, the spider-like evil of war and the destructiveness of colonialism, and the invasion of personal space made by modern society. The vehicles by which she conveys these themes are amazing: an American solider stalked by a Vietcong, presented from the Vietcong's point of view (Pull Out The Pin), a botched bank robbery (There Goes A Tenner), the adventures of a drug smuggler (Night of the Swallow), the ecological and social carelessness of the English in Australia (The Dreaming.) The result is surrealistic, horrific, passionate, and hypnotically fascinating from start to finish, and the passage of time has not so much dimmed its power as enhanced it. A great many people--including many who count themselves fans of both her earlier and later work--loathe this particular recording for its dissonance (a friend who walked in upon me one day while I was listening to it actually mistook Bush for Yoko Ono) and violence, but love it or hate it Bush's THE DREAMING far outreaches the similar-sounding SECURITY and SO by Peter Gabriel, and it remains a landmark of 20th Century high-art music.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the best pop (?) albums ever., February 24, 2004
Okay, I'm not sure what category of music _The Dreaming_ REALLY belongs to. There is an emphasis on vocals, hooks, and strong melodies, yet the sheer musical eclecticism and wild performance make for something quite beyond your johnny-pop music. Perhaps if she had a discography of 1000 albums and she were very popular, she might be afforded her own section (at the music store: rock, jazz, classical, metal, Kate Bush). But this album's defiance of traditional characterizations is no small part of its allure, nor is it a mean artistic feat. This is Kate Bush' perfect marriage of eclectic imagination, enthralling performance, and acute songcraft. Insofar as experimental pop goes, few albums are this listenable and artistically successful.And that performance...Bush sings like a woman possessed, essentially becoming different characters in each song. "Houdini", with its sensuous, snaky fretless bass and dreamy atmosphere, has Bush singing at times with the sweetness of the dappling of things and at others like an irate lioness. Musically, she is just as brilliant as she is with her voice. Her sense of rhythm and texture is remarkable, as is her ability to transform her influences (both in terms of artists and musical resources) into something very unique and strange. Her reconstruction of Celtic-folk dance on "Night of the Swallows" is sublime; her tense, driving beat and sneaky vocals on "There Goes a Tenner" is indelibly catchy; "Sat in Your Lap" kicks off with an infectious piano & drums shuffle, and Bush's vocals range from snappy utterances ("I see the people workin', I see it workin' for them") to faux-Broadway wails ("just when I think I'm king, I must admit..."). On "Leave It Open", Bush's singing altered with a malicious, metallic effect and is accompanied by chanting male voices and screeching synths, rising to layers of weird vocals caught up in heavy, gated percussion and terminating with Bush's voice run through tape-effects. Despite this album's weirdness and somewhat introverted nature, it is catchy and unfailingly fun to listen to. This is gold, I tell you. Very highly recommended!
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