In 1985, there was nothing else like it out there.
“Waking the Witch” builds from a dreamlike reverie to an almost overwhelming surfeit of input-industrial-strength drum machine, atonal guitars, death-metal growls-only to give way to “Watching You Without Me,” a shimmering ballad located halfway between Japanese ambient music and The Beatles’ most psychedelic pop. There’s an abiding elegance to sounds like the fretless bass of “Mother Stands for Comfort,” and whenever the album reaches a peak of intensity, she instinctively knows to pull back.
Availing herself of a state-of-the-art Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer, one of the first of its kind, she peppered the album with sound effects: church bells, breaking glass, bits of film dialogue, and the snippets of Georgian folk music that give “Hello Earth” its otherworldly power. Bush recorded the album at home, in the 48-track studio she installed in a barn behind her house just outside of London, in a lengthy process of demoing, overdubbing, and layering. Cryptic metaphors and allusions give the songs an unmistakably metaphysical aura, and the production follows suit. Bush’s voice is an instrument of breathtaking power, capable of both tenderness and force, yet Bush herself is everywhere and nowhere: Particularly in the second suite, her songwriting gives shape to a kind of fragmented consciousness, a shifting array of thoughts, voices, and perspectives. Split across two side-length suites-the five-song Hounds of Love and the seven-song The Ninth Wave-the album grapples with big themes: the gulf between men and women, the fierceness of a mother’s love, the nature of dreams. Likewise, few albums did more to take the ambition of progressive rock and port it into the digital era. Few songs are more evocative of the sound of mid-’80s pop than “Running Up That Hill,” with its gated drums, quasi-dance beat, eerie vocal effects, and instantly recognizable synthesizer melody. Vicki sees an opening and plays on Evelyn’s insecurities with the stroppy teenager skill she has developed pushing her own mother’s buttons.If Kate Bush’s first two albums were steeped in the art-rock of the ’70s (florid piano melodies, thrumming Hammond organs, a Spiders from Mars-grade rhythm section), then 1985’s Hounds of Love, the British singer-songwriter’s fifth LP, didn’t just reflect its era-it helped define it. A monstrous master in his own home, John (Curry) is a little fish in a bigger crime pond, taking frustrations out on his victims and his wife alike.
Attuned to cracks in relationships from her parents’ break-up, she realises that the needy Evelyn (Booth), who has children that don’t live with her and dotes on a child-substitute dog, is exploited by her perverse, domineering, inadequate partner. Rather than the basement cage in a remote house of most abduction movies, Vicki is chained in a prosaic back bedroom on a regular street, and the racket she raises often alerts nosey neighbours. An escape attempt is thwarted as it comes too early in the film to pay off, and agony is further prolonged by the sort of hard-to-watch ordeal (very tactfully shot) which became over-familiar (and thus devalued) in the Hostel heyday of torture porn.īut in other way this plays against expectations. Though expertly written and acted, the film defaults to a couple of well-worn clichés - reminiscent of Mum & Dad, Chained, Captivity and others few would want to watch more than once. It’s a shame Hounds Of Love is being released at a point where some viewers have started to baulk at more chained-up-in-the-basement movies. The result is something more than its abduction-horror plot suggests.