50 Words for Snow

An intimate winter gift

This is Kate Bush’s first album of new songs since Aerial came out in 2005. That album is one I cherish and I lose myself again and again in the complex, beguiling washes of sound. Aerial is the perfect English summertime album. Subdued and whispering, 50 Words for Snow is a handsome winter counterpart.

Blown from polar fur

It is a calmer, more intimate album than we have come to expect. Of course, intimate moments abound on Kate Bush’s earlier records, but here the dominant sound is piano with fewer embellishments than usual. The layered, spacious soundscapes are absent. This is to be listened to holed up indoors away from winter storms, chilling and warming by turns. The songs are all built around the concept of snow and the music softly echoes its magical fragility. We are never trapped Under Ice.

New material from Kate Bush, so rare, is always exciting as she offers so much. Her voice is captivating, the production lush and meticulous, but I relish most the elements of play and surprise. The ideas are fully formed, the characters speaking as clearly as her Cathy in Wuthering Heights, but we are never sure what will happen next. Aerial gave us blackbird song, Renaissance viols and Rolf Harris. 50 Words for Snow is not so dazzling or puckish, but subtle twists still bring smiles and no less so for their quietude.

There are the small, teasing details. In Lake Tahoe, the music pauses and Kate gasps; at the beginning of Snowed in at Wheeler Street, speech melts into song; the wonderful chorus voices in Wild Man are startling. The lyrical themes are astonishingly varied, as usual. Although conceptually linked, they range from a night of passion with a snowman to yeti persecution.

The first track, Snowflake, may be straighter, but the part of a falling snowflake is played by Kate’s thirteen-year-old son Bertie, whose performance is half-spoken, half-sung. His crystal treble voice perfectly evokes the season and, together with Kate’s warm singing and gentle piano, brings winter light to a yearning, tingling mother-and-son track. It is beautiful. Strings unobtrusively fill out the sound, adding an occasional decorative flurry.

Indeed throughout the album, the orchestration never intrudes on the intimacy. Among Angels, the final track, is oblique and touching in the same way as Aerial’s A Coral Room. Strings enter midway, but the focus is always on Kate and the piano. In Misty, the core sound is piano, bass and drums, coolly recalling a classic Blue Note rhythm section.

Misty is over thirteen minutes long. Kate Bush makes a snowman, with whom she then spends the night (“I kiss his ice cream lips”). In the morning he has gone, melted away. The music sustains the song, shifting to reflect the long narrative and featuring tremulous guitar and a noticeable huskiness in Kate’s voice. Lake Tahoe is similarly lengthy, but remains more static musically and doesn’t carry us in the same way, despite the inventive, ghostly words.

Robber's veil, creaky-creaky

The duet with Elton John, Snowed in at Wheeler Street, contains the strongest emotional breakout, telling a tale of lovers forever divided. The cathartic ending is forced perhaps, but till then it builds well on a menacing pulse and the star cameo from Kate’s own hero is interesting. Then, on the title track, Stephen Fry proposes a list of nonsense synonyms for snow, while Kate counts them off and in the chorus cheers him on (“Just 22 to go, let me hear your 50 words for snow!”). How strange and amazing. I was worried that Fry would break the spell with his familiar QI–Twinings purr, but he intones the words solemnly with just a hint of humour. Currently, my favourites are swans-a-melting, deamondi-pavlova and icyskidski.

In 50 Words for Snow, Kate Bush has produced hushed music which gleams in an icy hinterland. Like snow, it invites and unnerves, giving its gift quietly. I am enthralled by a musical vision which has yet to waver or disappoint. How lucky we are.

8.5

For more Kate Bush, read my review of The Red Shoes here... and The Kick Inside here!