Something good is gonna happen....

My first experience with Kate Bush was listening to “Don’t Give Up,” her duet with Peter Gabriel and actually released as a single in early ’87 in the US. My second experience was enjoying her as a sample and ebullient sound effect in Utah Saints’ immortal “Something Good,” adapting the best lyric of her career (“I just know that something good is gonna hap-PEN!”) for lubricious ends. 1993 was not a good time for English eccentrics who peaked with concepts and Fairlights six years earlier, which is why I overrate The Red Shoes. A finalist in my top ten that year, 2005′s Aerial suffers from muddled execution on its song side; the likes of “Pi” and “Joanni” sound like B-sides in search of a home and context (I love it anyway). The second disk — a depiction of aesthetic and sexual climax set to the chronology of the tides like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves — dawdles for fifteen minutes before “Nocturne” and the title track demonstrate how much Bush has learned about dynamics; her mastery of pitch and song form find their correlative in compositions that churn with a palpable sense of relief and release. “I feel I want to be up on the roof,” accompanied by rhythm guitar chugging, is as weird a hook as the “Cloudbusting” one cited above, ranking just below the part in “Get Out of My House” in which she mimics a donkey. Too bad 50 Words For Snow lacked songs for a concept. No matter: Kate Bush is worth the wait.

Here are my ten favorite Bush songs, according to a recent ILM poll. Her induction into Stylus’ Hall of fame inspired a few excellent appreciations, not least of which is Thomas Inskeep’s of “Experiment IV,” one of the best songs recorded expressly for a compilation (The Whole Story).

1. Hounds of Love
2. A Coral Room
3. Breathing
4. Get Out of My House
5. Cloudbusting
6. The Big Sky (The Meterological Mix)
7. Experiment IV
8. The Sensual World
9. Rubberband Girl
10. King of the Mountain

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