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If this sounds like heady stuff, it could be, but Bush never lets the material get too far from its pop trappings and purpose. But Hounds of Love was more carefully crafted as a pop record, and it abounded in memorable melodies and arrangements, the latter reflecting idioms ranging from orchestrated progressive pop to high-wattage traditional folk and at the center of it all was Bush in the best album-length vocal performance of her career, extending her range and also drawing expressiveness from deep inside of herself, so much so that one almost feels as though he's eavesdropping at moments during "Running Up That Hill." Hounds of Love is actually a two-part album (the two sides of the original LP release being the now-lost natural dividing line), consisting of the suites "Hounds of Love" and "The Ninth Wave." The former is steeped in lyrical and sonic sensuality that tends to wash over the listener, while the latter is about the experiences of birth and rebirth. Kate Bush's strongest album to date also marked her breakthrough into the American charts, and yielded a set of dazzling videos as well as an enviable body of hits, spearheaded by "Running Up That Hill," her biggest single since "Wuthering Heights." Strangely enough, Hounds of Love was no less complicated in its structure, imagery, and extra-musical references (even lifting a line of dialogue from Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon for the intro of the title song) than The Dreaming, which had been roundly criticized for being too ambitious and complex. Every element is put towards that purpose - what will best tell this story? Your mileage may vary on how much of that you can stomach, but to me I see genius in her particular brand of storytelling. So it seems to me she’s not all that interested in what makes a song a song, rather what makes a song a story.
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But why does she not just write stories in text then? Bush’s genius is in making the music perform the other roles in her stories - antagonist, chorus, mood-generator, weather, scene-setter - it is the canvas (to further mix the mediums) on which she paints her characters. These are not songs, they’re stories, and her lyrics tell the inner lives of her characters: Cloudbusting is the yearning, revolutionary youth marching through her life (“The sun coming out… I just know that something good is going to happen… Your sun’s coming out…”) The dreamer, pushing away modernity and their companions in Big Sky (“We pause for the jet… What was the question? I was looking at the big sky.”). It just so happens that rather than write her baroque, gothic literature in text, she writes it in sound. Wisps of magic (the magic of nature, especially), bizarre imagery and metaphor entwine with the usual anxieties: love motherhood death making deals with God. She’s an author of strange, literary fiction.
HOUNDS OF LOVE COVER SERIES
In 2022, the album re-entered various charts, including reaching number one on the Billboard Top Alternative Albums, due to the appearance of "Running Up That Hill" in the Netflix series Stranger Things. The album was nominated at the 1986 Brit Awards for Best British Album, at which Bush was also nominated for Best British Female and Best British Single for "Running Up That Hill". It is her best-selling studio album, having been certified double platinum for 600,000 sales in the UK, and by 1998 it had sold 1.1 million copies worldwide. It was Bush's second album to top the UK Albums Chart and in the US, it reached the top 40 on the Billboard 200. It is considered by many fans and music critics to be Bush's best album, and has been regularly voted one of the greatest albums of all time. Hounds of Love received critical acclaim both on its release and in retrospective reviews. The second side, subtitled The Ninth Wave, forms a conceptual suite about a woman drifting alone in the sea at night. The album's first side produced three further singles, "Cloudbusting", "Hounds of Love", and "The Big Sky".
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The album's lead single, "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)", became one of Bush's biggest hits, giving Bush her second number 1 UK single in June 2022. It was a commercial success and marked a return to the public eye for Bush after the relatively low sales of her previous album, 1982's The Dreaming. Hounds of Love is the fifth studio album by English singer Kate Bush, released on 16 September 1985 by EMI Records.