Waiting for Kate No More

I was expecting it sometime next week. It came, yesterday, in the mail. Shipped from Atlanta, and not saying "Sony/EMI" anywhere on the packaging. So I opened the manila mailer lined in bubble wrap wondering what half.com thing I had bought and forgot about, and looked inside. And there it was. The first Kate Bush album in 12 years, Aerial. In my hands at last.

I've been, ahem, previewing the tracks over the last couple of days, and been very pleased with what I have heard, but it wasn't real, it didn't count, until I had the Actual Album in my hands, and now I do. I have had a couple of proper listens now, CD booklet in hand (the first Kate Bush release with a booklet designed entirely, and initially, for CD booklet format).

Yes, I admit it -- I was nervous. What if I didn't like it? What if I thought it wasn't any good? What would I say about it then? I didn't like the idea of coming up with well-chosen ways to express any potential disappointment. This is Kate Bush we're talking about. To say I love Kate Bush would be something of an understatement. Whether it's my prerogative or not, I had a lot of investment in whether or not this album would be something I liked -- no, more like, something I thought was just as good or better than all the ones that had gone before, all the ones I love so much, that I have multiple copies of, that I'd save in a fire. So being able to say, truthfully and without reservation, that I think it's great, is wonderful. (I may even move on to "brilliant," but, no sense in going there right away. Although I'm pretty sure I will be at some point.)

It's early days yet for me to give a laundry list of which songs I like best, or to say, "Download this," because I'm not ready to be deconstructing Aerial. I will say that the first disc holds songs that are somewhat more self-contained than the pieces on the second disc, and that, while it probably won't ever be released as a single, "Bertie" is sure to delight. And that it's possible only Kate Bush could integrate pi into a song so it didn't sound like the lost years of Schoolhouse Rock (yes, pi, as in, you will hear numbers). The second disc is much harder to isolate things on, but portions of it do remind me, very sharply, that Kate Bush has said her favorite composers include Satie and Debussy. If you have ever wondered if jazz and flamenco belong in the same piece of music, you will learn that the answer is yes. And the mystery of that strange horizon of sound that makes up the cover artwork will be revealed.

If Kate Bush had gone into a time capsule, had been frozen in amber or carbonite ("We love you!" "I know.") or had otherwise somehow just been wakened from a Big Sleep, then this album would basically pick up from where we left off, 12 years ago. And that would have been all right, I suppose. But that's not what Aerial does. Aerial contains pieces of everything Kate Bush has picked up along the way these 30 or so years, but it's far from a retrospective or a self-referential pastiche. It goes somewhere new, perhaps not entirely unexpected, but full of revelations all the same.

Aerial is both a culmination and a trajectory -- a trajectory on which I'm definitely still wanting to go along for the ride, for as long as Kate is still willing to take us.

Posted on November 05, 2005 to horticulture

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