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178 of 193 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Different Aerial views, November 11, 2005
I've been listening to Kate for many years now, but around the time Red Shoes came out, I thought Kate ceased to be a mad genius and was now only a garden-variety genius.
And this album seemed a little ho-hum at first hearing. Sea of Honey has wonderfully campy prog rock feel, but also a heavy dose of sticky melancholy. There is pastoral tone (a la Lark Ascending) and mood of summer music complete with swooshing Hawaiian waves, cutesy touches (Italian theme, voices of Bertie and Harris and all these bloody birds) to the Sky of Honey. Me, I always loved the freaky side of Kate- Kite, Violin, Get out of my House, Waking the Witch, Walk Straight Down The Middle, Lily - rather than mushiness of This Woman's Work, and that's only hinted at on Aerial. And other than perfectly controlled King of the Hill and Pi, vocally Kate likes to let the quiver in her voice take over, and often loses pitch control in the lower registers.
And with all this, after listening to the entire album a few times, I am completely taken with Aerial.
It should be treated as a whole package. For starters, the album cover is great, the sound wave and sunset blended into surprisingly stark and beautiful picture. Inside the CD booklet, the pastel paintings, and photos of laundry and Kate's son flashing his milky whites are paired with a picture of someone wearing a supremely creepy "Indus Bird Mask", fashioned out of dead bird. A touch of shaman in Ms Domestic Goddess. No wonder Kate has been a muse to the likes of Outkast and Coil; there is more to her than meets the eye or the casual ear.
The lyrics have the beautiful simplicity of Yeats poetry. Mrs Bartolozzi can be Virginia Woolf internal monologue about mundane tasks, a mournful tribute to the departed or Dedalus epiphany, of seeing a girl standing in the water, with skirts around her waist, looking like an exotic bird with white plumage, and suddenly realizing what's important in your life. Or simply the best laundry song ever written. And how about the unexpected delight of Pi, where strings of numbers are turned into a passionate hymn dealing with obsession and infinity. I like the fact that Kate is not willing to explain all her lyrics, and allows people to bring their own interpretations to the table.
If you are musician, you should hear this album to witness an artist at the top of her game: it's not slapping few chords and verses together, this music is grown from a flash of underlying idea, and then woven like tapestry, dressed up, painted in delicate strokes. And Kate excels both in straightforward piano songs, like simple and devastating Coral Room, and dense and complex structures of Pi, Nocturne and Aerial. David Bowie may speak of Thomas Tallis, but it's Kate who writes an ecstatic ode to her son that seamlessly blends the old and the new, and sounds like an ancient court dance, complete with Renaissance guitar and violas orchestration, and contemporary song, all at once. And Aerial also has a piece of world music fusion so subtle that I actually missed it at first, until I realized that in Aerial Tal (Taal is a Hindi word for rhythm) Kate is singing a raga scale with the the birds... And after repeated listenings, the remarkable cycle and flow of Sky of Honey comes into full force. Discovering all the layers of Aerial is a great journey.
If you think this music is too simple for your taste, there's always Bach's Mass in B Minor with contrapuntal harmonies so complex, your brain may curdle. In my opinion, among currently not deceased composers, very few people are in Kate's league. I don't know why Tori Amos, a gifted artist whose music somehow leaves me cold, is being compared to Kate; both play the piano, but they are guided by very different aesthetics. Bjork has long surpassed her Fairy Godmother Kate in sheer musical inventiveness, but she is in a freaky place and not accessible for some people. Kate is still on top of the hill and I am glad she came out of hiding to give us this Aerial.
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180 of 197 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth the long wait., November 8, 2005
When I was 17, my now sister-in-law let me borrow Kate Bush's "The Whole Story", which kicked off what has no been a nearly eleven year love affair with Bush's music. Through virtually this entire time, I've heard the seemingly endless rumors about the new album being "worked on". As one would expect, eventually I pretty much gave up hope.
Imagine my surprise when a release date for "Aerial" was announced, a double CD, to be released just over twelve years after 1993's "The Red Shoes". And of course, you can imagine the level of anticipation in myself and probably every other Kate Bush fan out there.
The double album runs only a hair over eighty minutes long, but is split more conceptually-- the first disc, titled "A Sea of Honey", is a collection of unrelated songs. The second, titled "A Sky of Honey", is a reflection on the passage of a day.
Certainly the material on the first disc covers a lot of ground-- Bush seems to pretty much pick up where she left off, although her arrangements show a downright stunning depth as instruments swirl in and out of the mix. Opener and leadoff single "King of the Mountain" is a good example both of this and of the best sort of Kate Bush pop song-- it opens with electronic percussion and synths and eventually live drums joining to create a mid-tempo loping beat until the second verse where an electric guitar shows up and take the focus. Over all of this, Bush sings passionately about man becoming a myth, overt references to Elvis Presley and "Citizen Kane" throughout. The remainder of the disc proves amazingly diverse, treading through a harpsichord-driven ballad about her son (the achingly sentimental "Bertie"-- Bush pulls off expression of parental love better than anyone I've heard with her recitation of "you bring me such joy"), a driven, passionate piano piece about a house cleaner ("Mrs. Bartolozzi"), a funky pop song ("How to Be Invisible") and a lovely, subdued piano ballad ("A Coral Room"), among others. That it maintains a high level of quality throughout is a testament to its creator.
The second disc is definitely feels like a suite-- the music is all very relaxed, with rolling piano lines, lush strings, and hand drums playing in and out. The piece is constructed with several songs and some briefer tracks that establish continuity of the pieces, and while musically it's less diverse than the first disc, there are no fewer powerful moments from the delicate chords and wide-eyed (the latter by Bush's son Bertie) on the opening "Prelude" to the utterly superb "Sunset", which opens as a jazz-tinged ballad before moving into a frantic Spanish guitar section complete with castinets to the simply fantastic "Somewhere in Between".
The only thing this album is missing, truthfully, is that one piece that trumps them all-- there's nothing as immense as "This Woman's Work" or "The Infant Kiss" that stops you in your tracks, but even without that, the album is consistently of high quality and truthfully was worth the endless wait. Highly recommended.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Citizen Kate, November 8, 2005
Twelve years is a long time to wait for a record,. But fans will not be disappointed by a record that is unique and could only come from the Bush cannon.
The disc is split in two distinct pieces; the first a Sea of Honey are a collection of according to the singer "just Kate songs" and side two a song cycle about the waning of summer day, part told in bird song.
I have now listened to this album five or six times, and it wasn't quite what I has expected from the reviews. First of all I has expected disc 1 to be straightforward, and disc two to be as one reviewer put it: "properly properly eccentric"
But things are the other way round. True side one is a collection of great but unconnected songs, but it is here that the unexpected shines through. Thematically the opener King of Mountain deals with the sense of unmanageable fame via Elvis and Citizen Kane, and then moves onto Pi, with La Bush musing about obsession and infinity, singing the number exquisitely to umpteen decimal places. If Bjork did this it would look pretentious, but with Bush it actually works.
Bertie, an unconditional ode of love to her son, which is simple and pretty. Its harpsichord and simple production allows the subject matter to work against the odds. Mrs Bartolozzi, is equally simple in its production, just Kate and a grand piano, prompting many fans to suggest that this sounds like the early Cathy demos. Bush sceptics will laugh at the lyrics, which muse about daily chores containing a chorus of washing machine repeated thrice. But after two or three listens these images of doing the washing suggest loneliness, and had the reviewer wondering whether the woman felt imprisoned domestically or was going slowly mad, because she was grieving by washing her dead husband's clothes. Bush had gone on record saying she likes the ambiguity in this track so make your own choices.....
How To Be Invisible completely changes the tempo of the disc, with an impossibly catchy percussive guitar that permeates the entire track and won't let the listener go. Surely the next single, and possibly her most perfect ever chunk of pop craft from Bush yet!
Joanni, is drenched in the same thick and multi layered production (this is the main criticism) as King of the Mountain, and like the single seems over fussy and dated in its production. But thankfully the overproduction is only reserved to those tracks, and disc two ends on a career best in vocal delivery and simpli-complex song crafting .This may not be single material, but with Bush you never know, she may release it anyway. Whichever way you look at it, it's an instant classic.
Disc Two is a bit of a puzzle. Critics were hinting at something quite barmy, even for Bush. But it turns out not to be so. Yes In one track she sings in Blackbird language, and Rolf Harris (random UK/OZ celebrity/aritst) pops up in voice and playing Didgeridoo.
BUT, this is not what most people were expecting. The production sounds sonically simple (even if deceptively so), and the song writing is more classic and conventional than side one.
In fact the song construction is so straightforward and devoid of the Bush trippyness that the listener may be a little surprised and caught of guard. This is not to say this is dull ordinary, its far to accomplished for that, but we are talking about more conventional melodies that we have been used to from la Bush.
There are potential singles on here, An Architect's Dream, Sunset, and most especially Somewhere In Between being entities in their own right, but this is a piece to be listened to as a whole, and Bush has so far refused to discuss specifc songs.
The final quartet of songs, Sunset, Somewhere in Between, Nocturn, and Aerial, showcase Bush at her most polished, joyous. And (excluding the final song) is her most accessible and commercial output ever. This is classy ambient chill-out that Dido and Enya can only dream of. This might sound odd, but Bush travels this well trodden path with more conviction and grace than the best in this class, and it's her first attempt!
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