Ranking Kate Bush albums

Watching Kate Bush emerge as more than a mere anxiety of influence for every female singer-songwriter-pianist has impressed me the last twenty years; but why aren’t The Kick Inside, The Red Shoes, and especially The Dreaming more lauded? Why stop at Hounds of Love and “This Woman’s Work,” as grand as they are? As I grow old and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, I hear in Bush deeper correlatives for my lusts and ways of thinking about how I share complicated feelings.

1. The Dreaming (1982)

Like her pal Peter Gabriel, Bush discovered in the Fairlight synthesizer an instrument whose possibilities were limited only by her imagination, and like Gabriel she reached the peak of her powers when she took control of the production. The Dreaming envisages an English culture broken by war and made mad by nuclear threat. Even schoolgirl fact get muddled: “Some say that hell is heaven,” a chorus of multitracked Kates avers in “Sat In Your Lap.” Trucks and horns wail as the soldier about to vaporize himself tells himself, “I love life!” with the conviction of the character in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. By the end of the album she’s turned into a mule. Her first sales disappointment, overshadowed by Hounds of Love, The Dreaming is where Kate Bush joined rock’s great eccentrics. Thanks to her Fairlight she became a polymorphous, ambisexual creator. Not many successors followed.

2. Hounds of Love (1985)

It’s in the trees. It’s coming! To watch this album’s reputation soar in the last fifteen years reminds me of the import of devil’s bargains: Hounds of Love, her American breakthrough, obscures the rest of her career. The Futureheads covered the title track, and Big Boi adores the body swap anthem “Running Up That Hill,” amazingly a top forty hit in America in late ’85. Not much is written about the second half, a sidelong exploration of falling through ice in which nursery rhymes and Irish jigs constitute the child’s memories. “Watching You Watching Me” is a subtler take on “Running Up That Hill.” The B-sides (“Under the Ivy”) are wonders too. Let me steal this moment from you now: “Be Kind to My Mistakes,” yet another Bush composition in which she coaxes her lover into becoming her. For Bush, empathy requires total immersion in the other so long as they can recognize what distinguishes them.

3. Aerial (2005)

This album, released a dozen years after The Red Shoes, is tantalizingly bifurcated: a disc of quote-unquote normal Bush songs: fantasias about Elvis and Joan of Arc, the affection between a domestic and her washing machine, that sort of thing, with one of her most limpid ballads, “A Coral Room”; the second, a meticulously segued account of a painter making sense of how beautiful the day is. When I bought Aerial I ignored the second disc; it didn’t climax — a stupid notion. Hadn’t Kate Bush taught me to avoid these rebarbative metaphorical associations?

4. The Red Shoes (1993)

Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Prince? Bush’s pop crossover — or, specifically, Bush’s VH-1 crossover album? Well, no. Think of David Gilmour during her germinal career phase. Gabriel, of course. Older men. If The Red Shoes was supposed to cross over, then “Rubberband Girl” was a strange way of doing so. As straightforward as “You’re the One” sounds chordally, Beck competes with Trio Bulgarka and the helium squeaks from Bush’s synth. “Eat the Music,” about the erotic possibilities of papayas and mangoes, employs sampled horns and yeah-yeah-yeahs. On “Big Stripey Lie” guitarist-bassist-keyboardist Bush mumbles, “Oooh, it’s a jungle out there.” But in “Top of the City” she has a trad ballad that Maxwell could’ve sold to R&B radio. Katherine St. Asaph wrote a profound, affectionate re-appraisal for the One Week One Band blog a few years ago. Read it.

5. The Sensual World (1989)

Thanks to the shimmering “Love and Anger,” #1 modern rock, my intro to the Lionheart, known best as the home of “This Woman’s Work,” Bush’s only gold album in America. On the second side she goes further than most performers describing the cords of memory that bind couples, anticipating modern developments too: what constitutes a Deeper Understanding after you’ve met on ARPANET? “Between a Man and a Woman” directs its advice to an unknown “you,” whose presence guitarist Alan Murphy acknowledges with irritated squawks. The title track, as Robert Christgau rightly pointed out, would give Henry James a boner, in part because Bush would turn herself into Hugh Walpole for the sake of The Master’s affection — better said about “Running Up That Hill” but whatever. The Old Weird Kate we love rears her head on “Heads We’re Dancing,” in which an Argentine tango turns into a dance with Hitler.

6. Never For Ever (1980)

Three seminal singles (“Babooshka,” “Breathing,” “Army Dreamers”) helped Bush’s third album ascend to a new peak: Never for Ever was the first studio album by a British woman to hit #1. “Breathing” in particular could have stretched comfortably on 1982’s The Dreaming.

7. The Whole Story (1986)

Such product control — her only compilation that’s not a box set, here for “Experiment IV,” chilly and implacable with its drums obstinate about refusing to hit the four. “Music made for pleasure, music made to thrill,” she sings, her mantra.

8. The Kick Inside (1978)

A debut we’d be championing today if she didn’t record another note, The Kick Inside chronicles how a consciousness steeped in literature and Powell-Pressburger films contexualizes rapture of all kinds. The point of this nineteen-year-old’s album is to be off-putting at times; teens and post-teens put barbed wire around their emotions while Bush, already an auteur, is finessing them with Gothic and music hall contours. Let “Them Heavy People” serve as her testament: “It’s nearly killing me, but what a lovely feeling!”