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From: nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (Doug Alan)
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Kate Bush's "The Dreaming", the best album ever or ever to be
Message-ID: <3408@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 11-Jan-85 06:37:29 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.3408
Posted: Fri Jan 11 06:37:29 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Jan-85 07:14:49 EST
Distribution: net.music
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 138

[We let the weirdness in.]

Hi!  Do you like artistic rock such as Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, King
Crimson, or Laurie Anderson?  If you do please read on.  If on the
other hand you think that Michael Jackson, Asia, and Culture Club
represent the ultimate in musical experience, please swallow two
cyanide tablets (not enclosed) or just skip to the next message.  Both
actions will violate the true meaning of life.

My purpose here is tell you about the best album recorded or that ever
will recorded.  It is "The Dreaming" by Kate Bush.  I am spending the
time to tell you about this album because unlike the Pink Floyd, Peter
Gabriel, etc., Kate Bush is little known in the U.S. and needs the
advertisement.  I am also spending the time because unfortunately if
"The Dreaming" does not get more success, Kate Bush may never produce
anything nearly as good as "The Dreaming" ever again.

"The Dreaming" is Kate Bush's fourth album.  She became very popular
in England with her first three albums "The Kick Inside", "Lionheart",
and "Never for Ever", which are on a bizarre fringe of Pop.  With "The
Dreaming", though she totally departed from Pop to create her own area
of music.  Unfortunately, "The Dreaming" was not well-received at all
in England, but strangely enough has created a small but incredibly
dedicated cult following in the U.S.  It seems likely that if "The
Dreaming" does not gain in popularity, Kate Bush's record company will
pressure her to produce again more commercial stuff.

"The Dreaming" is a perfect album.  That is why I said it is the best
album recorded or that ever will be recorded.  You can't get any
better than perfection.  Perhaps there is an album I don't know of or
an album yet to be that is as good, but there is none nor will be none
better.

The biggest influence for "The Dreaming" seems to be Peter Gabriel's
third album (which is also a great album).  In fact Kate Bush sings
background vocals for two songs on the album, "No Self-Control" and
"Games Without Frontiers".  (Kate Bush hangs around with a good crowd.
Besides being a good friend of Peter Gabriel, she is also a good
friend of David Gilmour, who "discovered" her and also does some
background vocals on "The Dreaming".)  Though similar in some ways to
Peter Gabriel's third album, "The Dreaming" is also very different.
The lyrics, while being even stranger than Peter Gabriel's, hit closer
to home.
	Man:	Woman, let me in
		Let me bring in the memories
		Woman, let me in
		Let me bring in the Devil Dreams
	Woman:	I will not let you in
		Don't you bring back the reveries
		I turn into a bird
		Carry further than the word is heard
	Man:	Woman, let me in
		I turn into the wind
		I blow you a cold kiss
		Stronger than the song's bit
	Woman:	I will not let you in
		I face towards the wind
		I change into the Mule
		Hee-Haw
		Hee-Haw
Kate Bush's voice is amazing.  It ranges from a piercing
high to a powerful bass, and she uses it perfectly.  The music is all
very layered.  Every song with the exception of one required two 24
track tapes to record.  The album takes two or three listenings at
first to overcome the sensory overload, but after that listening to
the album is bliss.  Every time I listen to the album, I can hear
something new that I didn't hear before.  Every time I like the album
even more.  This is opposed to most albums, which I get tired of after
listening to them for a while.

Here is a review of "The Dreaming" by Kurt Loder from Musician
(Copyright 1983) included without permission:

	This is what progressive rock might have become had it
	actually progressed, rather than congealing into the massed,
	lumbering cliches that came to distinguish its latterday
	forms.  Oblivious to all fashions, Britain's Kate Bush has
	advanced into a musical area that's unquestionably her very
	own -- a kind of mystic and semi-inscrutable artsong that
	slowly draws you in and keeps you marvelling at her unending
	invention and oblique, multilayered meanings.

	Although well appreciated in her homeland, Bush has been a
	source of continuing puzzlement for her American record
	company: how to promote a female performer who's neither a
	chirrupy sex doll nor a punked-out doom-shrieker?  Her
	problems with popular acceptance -- aside from the fact that
	she's a gifted musician, songwriter and producer who happens
	to be a beautiful woman to boot -- are once again apparent on
	"The Dreaming", as is her extraordinary artistry.  "Sat In
	Your Lap", the lead song here, is a furiously percussive track
	that considers -- of all things -- the difficulty of obtaining
	true wisdom without work ("Some say that knowledge is
	something sat in your lap," she trills).  Likewise, when was
	the last time you heard a surreal, faintly political song
	about bank robbery ("There Goes a Tenner") or a Vietnam War
	retrospective written from the point of view of a stalking
	guerrilla ("He's big and pink and not like me / He sees no
	light / He sees no reason for the fighting")?

	"Night Of The Swallow" considers another clandestine
	operation, this one airborne and apparently ill-fated ("Wings
	fill the window / And they beat and bleed"); "All The Love"
	considers life's eternally underpondered transience ("All the
	love we could have given / ... 'I needed you to love me too.
	I wait for your move'").  And on "The Dreaming", the albums
	most startling and unsettling track, Bush brings in Rolf ("Tie
	Me Kangeroo Down, sport") Harris on digeridu [an aborigine
	instrument] for a frightening rumination on the rape of native
	culture in Australia: "Bang' goes another Kanga / On the
	bonnet of the van / ... Erase the race that claim the place
	and say we dig for ore."

	Throughout all of this, Bush layers dense musical textures and
	elliptical catch-phrases into an elsewhere unexampled work of
	disturbing art.  The production is thick and rich, her
	high-pitched vocals often astonishing in their wayward
	inspiration, and her arrangements -- based largely on her own
	keyboard playing [Piano, Fairlight, and CS80] -- offer
	surprise at every turn.

	You're not likely to see "The Dreaming" much advertised or
	otherwise promoted in these days of parlous record-company
	finances -- even though this is her first LP to be released in
	this country in four years.  My advice to seekers after artful
	rock: get her while you can.

So, now you have no excuse.  You can't say that you never heard of
Kate Bush.  Go buy the album!  If you don't won't you feel empty
knowing that you haven't listened to the best album ever or ever to
be.

			Remember to treat the gelignite tenderly for me,

			Doug Alan
			genrad!mit-eddie!nessus
			Nessus@MIT-MC