KATE BUSH - Aerial

Princess Kate, we love you. But where have you been all these years? Chatting with the fairies? No matter, as soon as we heard about your return we rejoiced, waiting for an emotion to shake us from our torpor, a song, a piano, a voice. Princess, we still love you, but right now we're turning a lovely digipack over in our hands, smiling happily, yet with a bitter aftertaste, a thin thread of disappointment.

Two CDs (the first “A Sea Of Honey”, the second “A Sky On Honey”) for just over 80 minutes total. Perhaps they could have made the effort to put it all on one disc, maybe trimming a track (though maybe that wasn't even necessary) - alas, there's an embarrassment of riches here, and you have to charge accordingly, but these are the petty considerations of us earthbound types; the pure hearts at the record label clearly can't be expected to understand.

It opens with “King Of The Mountain”, the single, but the track never quite lands and leaves us indifferent from the first listen to the umpteenth: a poor attempt at redoing “Running Up That Hill”, with which it shares the same measured gait. The second track, “Pi”, leaves us downright puzzled: nice bass work, and there's something curiously lyrical about the way Kate Bush sings numbers (3, 14... naturally), with a sprinkling of electronics around the edges, but it feels like we've fallen for the old trick of a painstaking arrangement designed to mask the weakness of the song itself. Nice sounds, but not much else.

A complete change of register with “Bertie”, one of the best tracks, with a curiously Renaissance atmosphere, complete with cello and "renaissance guitar". It genuinely sounds like a John Renbourn piece from Pentangle. With the fourth track we finally arrive at the dimension we prefer, our Princess at the piano. “Mrs. Bartolozzi”, beautifully voiced as ever, romantic and dark piano, a rise and fall dense with sweetness and tension - and yet you get the impression of circling around a melody that never quite arrives, waiting for a magic that never takes shape. We're left puzzled: a beautiful track, but incomplete, unexpressed.

“How To Be Invisible” picks the rhythmic dimension back up, with an almost bluesy aftertaste and rich arrangements, but propping up a melodic line that simply isn't there... we're increasingly perplexed. Then comes “Joanni”, the low point of the record: electronic rhythm, affectation piled on in abundance to dress up a bland, pointless song. We're disheartened, and the Princess seems to sense it, gifting us a gem to close the first disc, “A Coral Room”: piano and voice, heart on sleeve and great poetry, an abyss of spleen. Goosebump-inducing.

The mood and style of “A Coral Room” also pervades the opening of the second disc, a continuum (not quite a suite), much like “A Ninth Wave” on “Hounds Of Love”. “Prelude” is exactly what the title suggests, and it introduces “Prologue”, deeply intimate with a thread of uneasy darkness, then “An Architect's Dream”, suspended as if on a bed of keyboards and percussion, and “Sunset”, introduced by the very brief “The Painter Link”, once again focused on piano and voice, crystalline beauty with a mock-Latin finale. These are the record's best moments, great internal cohesion between the tracks, a listen that only seems easy at first but is actually demanding, with oblique, elusive melodies and sounds and voice full of nuance.

The mood lightens a little with “Somewhere In Between” (introduced by “Aerial Tal”), a slight detour into a more conventional pop that doesn't quite fit the record's tone. We approach the finale with confidence, and yet “Nocturn”, which brings back an electroacoustic mood, is certainly engaging and full of refinements, but ultimately drags you along for eight minutes in a somewhat inconclusive way, and the finale, with the title track - synthetic rhythm, incisive at times - leaves us rather puzzled by its evanescent obsessiveness.

A work that is at times highly refined, often intimate and not the easiest to absorb, it stands as surely the Kate Bush album furthest from pop/rock stereotypes, the most ambitious and perhaps the most demanding and courageous, but just as surely not the best. A certain underlying cerebral quality, the lack of melodic openings - an art she's normally a master of - a tone that's a bit too compressed, and above all the presence of several weak tracks, leave us with the taste of a missed opportunity.

We still love you, Princess Kate, but you'll forgive us if we now go back to listening to “The Kick Inside” or “Hounds Of Love”.

P.S. There are some orchestral parts on the record, conducted and arranged by Michael Kamen, who passed away not long ago: we remember him.

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30/11/2006