Best song on Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love

What a fucking perfect record.

even the songs that got no votes are totally awesome!

Ha, so true.

I listened to Morning Fog this sunny cold morning. Perfect.

I'm a Kate Bush newbie, but I've been totally obsessed with this album recently, so so great. Had I voted I'd probably go for "Cloudbusting" or "Running Up That Hill" because I am a newbie, but holy shit the coda of "Cloudbusting", the vocals, so majestic. The 12" mix of "Running Up That Hill" on the remastered album is fabulous too. I also love "Jig of Life" and "The Morning Fog". One off the way comment: Sinead's "Troy" makes more sense to me having heard this album; it has a bit more context, instead of being this "holy shit where did something this awesome come from?" song that it's been for me for 20 years.

Didn't we have a thread about which album was best for newbies? I thought we did, but I can't find it. Anyway, I recently lent my friend my CD of The Dreaming because he wanted to try her music out (he picked it from my stacks, not me). Well of course, he didn't like it (I tried to warn him as to the uh...odd nature of that fantastic album), so I sent him home with Hounds instead. We'll see how that works out.

Supposedly The Church are covering the song "Hounds of Love" on an EP coming out soon called "The Coffee Hounds EP". Well it was supposed to be out in February anyway...

Ha! The first Kate I heard was also "The Dreaming," which I borrowed from a friend because of the "recommended if you like Peter Gabriel" comparisons. I returned it with the comment "I don't really get this, but I have a feeling that in a year or two I'm going to love it." Which was exactly true.

Well I seem to remember meeting a boy one night when I was a teenager who only knew The Dreaming. We ended up doing some pretty freaky drugs and looking at the stars, and then I never saw him again. But he was totally crazy about The Dreaming. Go figure.

I have The Dreaming too and I'll give it a listen. A while back I got a bunch of Kate Bush (thanks, lala!) but haven't gotten around to listening to most of it. But Hounds of Love continues to blow me away so I guess it will soon be time to venture further into her oeuvre (but not yet, I am luxuriating in Hounds of Love for the indefinite future).

The Dreaming is ALMOST as good imho.

albums where the experimental side eclipses even the marvellous pop side #1

Well, my friend said that when he heard "Hello Earth", that did it for him. So we've got another convert folks!

don't think i voted 'Hello Earth' in this but would do now

Pinnacle of recorded music.

do you (or anyone for that matter) have any other recordings of the Georgian folk song it uses?

i have that Hamlet CD people told me to get -- Hamlet Gonashvili -- which has the song

it's very pretty

She said come on, let me live girl

where on your palm is my little line

SHE SAID COME ON LET ME LIVE, GIRL

i've been watching her old interviews all day, i like the one with desmond morris and the one on the kids show best although the cooking show one is great too. ah, youtube.

No album can beat the opening two tracks on this

Everytime I hear "Running Up That Hill" I snap into "omg best song evar!" mode

do you (or anyone for that matter) have any other recordings of the Georgian folk song it uses?

upthread here: Best song on Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love

still haven't bought the original recording on melodiya, but if 'Hello Earth' is your favorite track, you definitely want to buy yourself a copy of that Hamlet CD. I've listened to it a lot the last year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/oct/11/popandrock

thanks for that link jl.

One of those rare albums in which pretty much every track is a contender. As such, I'm surprised that the poll results are so lopsided. I voted for the title track, as that bridge-to-chorus never fails to give me the blissful spine-chills.

i don't think i voted in this. "hello earth" might be my favorite, but it's also demanding listening, so when it comes on itunes random play, i sometimes skip past it.

it was used so wonderfully in that one miami vice episode.

i love demanding listening btw, i just need to make sure i can commit the time/attention to be able to hang with it. which is hard when i'm in the middle of running errands or whatever.

right

miami vice??

*CONTROVERSIAL*
never forever and the dreaming are better than this

miami vice:

"i get outta my car" and the whole song breaks open

full episode is on hulu:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/14849/miami-vice-bushido

I was a latecomer to this album and Kate Bush in general, but I wish I could time-travel back and burn a copy of this albu, for all for the many girl/friends I had in high-school and college who thought Tori Amos invented this shit (though some of them seemed to think that Tori invented music itself, and an attempt to convince them otherwise, however reasonable, would likely have resulted in denial and/or rage).

*sorry for the typing mess.

yawn.

yawn kant tori read

Were you bored by my post, Tim, or are you just sleepy? Please insert zing here ____________________.

I can't really be bothered getting into the argument now, but in brief, the whole "Woah Kate Bush is the OG Tori Amos" line is:

a) wrong;
b) boring, lazy, overstated criticism along the lines of "Steely Dan is what punk was born to fight against" or "rap is nothing but bling and sexism" (albeit not as sweeping as those two examples); and
c) leaving aside whether it's fair on Tori Amos, a massive distortion of what makes Kate Bush interesting, by implicitly reducing her to whatever falls within the stylistic venn diagram created by the two artists, which is not much: they're actually very different as songwriters, as arrangers and as singers.

Fair enough. If it's a cliche to make the comparison, I wasn't aware of that, and I'm not really prepared for nuanced critical debate on the issue anyway, as I've never sat down and listened to them side by side. I have been listening to a lot of Kate Bush recently, and have been struck by the vocal resemblance, so I'll stand by that at least.

:)

I probably overreact when i see the comparison because it's made so often and in such sweeping terms from people who basically want an easy stick to beat one or both artists with - I'm sure a search of the ILM archives will yield any number of examples, many of which i've responded to in more detail.

What most annoys me about it is that it implies that there is only space for one of these artists, when the same claim would not be made about actually-more-similar groups and artists etc. It's as if "genre" is a prop reserved exclusively for male rock.

(plus Tori sounds more like Stevie Nicks crossed with Joni Mitchell)

Lex summed it up pretty concisely previously:

"They play the piano and their vocal ranges overlap and that is all they share. Their entire aesthetic foundations are completely different - they sing about wildly different subjects in wildly different ways. Tori has not professed any debt to Kate Bush - what she has said is that she was never aware of Kate Bush until very late because Kate Bush never really broke America to a great extent."

...

"Their vocal differences are more numerous and more important {than their vocal similarites}... Tori can rasp in a way Kate doesn't, and always sounds libidinous while Kate sounds asexual. Also, their vocals work in completely different ways - when Kate does kooky affectations, it's deliberate and controlled, almost like performance art; Tori, on the other hand, makes her mispronunciations and mannerisms sound natural by-products of her emotion.

asexual otm

one of the most obvious differences to me s the instrumentation. i guess i see more similarity when it comes to early kate, but later kate employed a variety of instruments/synths that tori never seemed to.

Alright, but we know that The Church have just covered Kate Bush's song Hounds of Love right?

I can't keep up with this thread. I'm too drunk just now.

The who the what now?

I stuck this on earlier, and what really jumped out was Kate's sibilant 'ess'es, especially on the title track. I've never noticed it before, but she's quite hissy (also breathier than I'd thought). Is it maybe a treatment on the vocal, or even the limitation of mp3 as a format?

it's kate dude

she's always been a grand enunciator. her t's, c's and k's are pretty mean too

I'm cool with it