Kate Bush – “Lionheart” (1978)

Rating: 7

Best Song – “Symphony in Blue”

My comment in the previous review about not being able to imagine Bush improving on the style of The Kick Inside was admittedly, a bit of foreshadowing, as Lionheart is basically The Kick Inside, Part Two, but a significantly weaker version. It’s also an album that I’m not sure I have a lot to say about. Overall, I still enjoy it when it’s on, as the basic style is the same. If anything, it is even slightly more diverse than Kick and the production is slightly more modern-sounding. Yet the general song structure of rambling, jazzy piano-led ballads is the same.

The problem for me is that on the debut, all of those dramatic, theatrical ballads somehow each had their own unique flavor and multiple points in each song that I found indelibly charming. They pulled off the rare feat of being complex but also catchy. Yet I’ve listened to Lionheart half a dozen times, and I still can’t remember how any of the songs go without putting them back on to listen again, indicating the balance is shifted way too much towards the side of complexity. There are definitely hooks, but even the better songs here feel awkwardly structured, so that I really enjoy about half of a song, but find the other half boring. Except it’s not like the first half of a song is great and the second half of a letdown, but more like I find myself enjoying random snippets of the song but not the entire thing. Perhaps because of this, I seem to pick out a completely different set of songs as the relative highlights and lowlights each time as well (at least for now, the crystal-clear production of the opening “Symphony in Blue” and the tender wail contrasted with rocking chorus of the closing “Hammer Horror” are the stand-outs to me).

I suppose the argument could be made that I need to just keep digging, and maybe listen number ten will be the one where the latent genius of the album suddenly materializes itself. But I doubt it. Several listens have warmed me up to the point where I’m willing to give it a positive rating rather than a neutral or even slightly negative one. Though there is little great material here, there aren’t any outright bad songs either. But listen number six to Lionheart is still well below my enjoyment level of listen number one for The Kick Inside and The Dreaming. In the end, it comes down to songwriting, and Lionheart strikes me as consisting of pleasant, but forgettable leftovers from the debut, and based on Kate's comments about the album, that seems to have indeed been the case. Fortunately, there were better things yet to come!