Kate Bush - "50 Words for Snow" (2011)

Rating: 8

Best Song: “Misty”

Kate’s creative comeback continues! Although given the seven year gap between this one and Aerial, perhaps 50 Words for Snow should be seen as a new chapter in Kate’s career. Met with fairly universal critical acclaim, I’m not going to disagree. Almost miraculously for an artist who released her greatest work 29 years earlier, and for an artist who already reinvented herself in 2004 with Aerial, she once again makes an album that is different from all the ones that came before, yet still inimitably Kate Bush

If I were to make a Kate Bush chronology, 50 Words does tie most closely to Aerial and the two albums certainly qualify as her ‘late period’ so far. Yet this is a different beast altogether, with long, almost ambient songs (just 7 tracks ranging from 7 to over 13 minutes). Although the piano, singing style and concept/fantasy songs are all still here, identifying this as a Kate Bush album, I’m still taken by how singular this album feels. The opening 9-minute “Snowflake” nicely sets a template for the rest of the album. It utilizes a repeated piano riff throughout the song that serves as the melodic backbone, then slowly builds in instrumentation as Kate gently sings of being a snowflake falling to Earth. Yet if by the song length, you would expect some sort of epic composition, this isn’t really it. It does have multiple sections, with Kate hitting some increasingly high notes in the mid-section, yet even this is done in a fairly understated way. There’s no crescendo or ultimate payoff, instead the different sections of the song rotate in and out almost randomly, before fading out on the opening verse/chorus section for nearly the entire second half of the song. Instead, it’s all about whether she captures a certain atmosphere, perhaps the feeling of being alone in a dark house on a cold winter night. It’s not about the immediate payoff but whether you’re captured by that atmosphere. In that sense, she does tie back to her earlier career, just through different means.

Much to my delight, most of the songs here see Kate playing different parts again, working in the conceptual/fantastical/theatrical mode that was always her strength. The standout track of the album (and one that I'm unhealthily obsessed with) is “Misty,” telling the story of a love affair with a snowman. It works on the strength of its repetition, slowly building in intensity as it goes. It doesn’t hurt that it has some beautiful piano playing and that the instrumentation creates an increasingly intoxicating atmosphere. It’s all about a slow, measured pace, where it doesn’t matter that it takes five minutes for the guitar to come in as long as it’s satisfying when it gets there. Yet even though it remains understated, the passion in Kate’s voice is still there and ultimately sells it. “Snowed In on Wheeler Street,” a duet with Elton John, has another great and classically Kate concept, about time traveling lovers. I interpret it as being similar to the novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, though with two people traveling through time instead of just one. Regardless, despite my usual hatred of the ‘celebrity duet’ concept, I think it makes sense here, and Elton holds his own with Kate vocally, proving that he quite as washed up as I thought.

I do have some reservations about the album that prevent me from giving an even higher rating even though I am tempted to do so. The slow pace and length of these songs could make this album seem inaccessible and indeed, it did take me a second listen before the songs started to make sense to me (although I still can’t entirely wrap my brain around the structure of “Lake Tahoe” or even “Snowflake”). I still find the title track is tedious (the concept is that actor Stephen Fry recites 50 synonyms for snow) – although the concept is interesting and the different words for snow fairly creative, there’s not really a lot of meat to the track musically so the novelty value didn’t last for me. And perhaps more importantly in the broad scope of her career, although I find this shift in style quite satisfying from a creative perspective, especially when so many artists of Kate’s age are content to rest on their laurels and deliver generic re-workings of their older classics, I need the ‘insane’ factor to really take me to the next level with Kate. But in the end, these are mild reservations, and I am quite satisfied with 50 Words for Snow, and perhaps, most importantly, eager to see what she will release next.