It's so deep I don't think that I can speak about it
April 2, 2018 7:40 PM   Subscribe

The Sensual World [full album, ~45m] is a 1989 album from Kate Bush. If you've never listened to it before, you should. If you have listened to it before, you should also listen to it. Side A: The Sensual World [video], Love And Anger [video], The Fog, Reaching Out, Heads We're Dancing posted by hippybear (51 comments total) 50 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thank you!!!!!!!

*dies*
posted by greermahoney at 7:44 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


You wouldn’t think a song about Hitler would be on my favs list, but you’d be wrong.
posted by greermahoney at 7:47 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


No discussion about The Sensual World is complete without reference to Bush’s later album, Director’s Cut, which revisits four tracks from The Sensual World and seven from her subsequent album The Red Shoes.

Of particular note is the leading track, ”Flower of the Mountain”, a reworking of “The Sensual World” which restores Bush’s original intent to use excerpts from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses for the lyrics, the rights to which she was unable to secure at the time “The Sensual World” was recorded.
posted by The Situationist Room with Guy Debord at 8:10 PM on April 2, 2018 [12 favorites]


So I was pretty much sold on You're The Worst by this point, but Lindsay's karaoke version of This Woman's Work was the final nail in the "this is now one of my favorite shows ever" coffin.
posted by elsietheeel at 8:23 PM on April 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


It's worth calling attention to the Trio Bulgarka, who collaborated on the unearthly choral music in the background of a lot of the songs. If you know anybody else who can sing like that, I bet you don't.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:51 PM on April 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


Well, there's Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares who perform in a similar style. Both groups were originally part of the Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:58 PM on April 2, 2018 [9 favorites]


Also, I love this album in an unapologetically sentimental high school kind of way.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:01 PM on April 2, 2018 [6 favorites]


Also, in case you have become unstuck with casaulity, and you have both listened to it before, yet it is a completely unknown quantity to you, you should listen to it right away, while completely ignoring it's existance.
posted by Samizdata at 9:11 PM on April 2, 2018 [7 favorites]


"Love and Anger" is one of my all-time favorite songs. I also love the album except I think the production damages a lot of it. Director's Cut doesn't necessarily fix this completely but those reinterpretations are quite good.
posted by Joey Michaels at 9:23 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


Samisdata has better drugs than I do.
posted by hippybear at 9:23 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


To clarify - overproduced Kate Bush still rocks
posted by Joey Michaels at 9:25 PM on April 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


The way Kate Bush says "Yeah." at the end of Love and Anger is the most charming thing I've ever heard.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:28 PM on April 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


Love And Anger is such an emotionally entangling song across its various levels
posted by hippybear at 9:29 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


And as good as this is, it's only my fourth favorite of hers.
posted by waytoomuchcoffee at 9:32 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


Is The Dreaming anyone here’s fav? Cuz that’s mine <3
posted by greermahoney at 9:47 PM on April 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


And as good as this is, it's only my fourth favorite of hers.

But did you listen to it again now because of this post?

Because you should.
posted by hippybear at 9:50 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


Haven't gotten into Kate Bush ever but I probably finally should huh.

Still waiting for that Big Boi collab though.
posted by valrus at 9:53 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


Listen to this album. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you won't like her other stuff. But maybe you'll like her at some point. Her music is brilliant and genre-busting, and is a lot of fun and also challenging in a good way.
posted by hippybear at 9:56 PM on April 2, 2018 [5 favorites]


My favorite Kate Bush album is Aerial, for reasons perfectly expressed by Mark Fisher in his beautiful piece on the album.

If ‘A Sea of Honey’ is a kitchen-sink delirium, its spaces all carpeted and walled, then ‘A Sky of Honey’ is widescreen, panoramic, as the words of the stand-out track, ‘Nocturn’, have it. Everything opens out. It’s as if we leave the artificial cocoon of the house to step out into the garden, a garden which becomes a lush Ernst jungle…
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:59 PM on April 2, 2018 [6 favorites]


If I could choose a musical reality to live inside whenever I had vacation days to spend it would be A Sky Of Honey.

It's such a journey that ends in a burst of joy, it's something that has earned Immortal Status in y music library.
posted by hippybear at 10:04 PM on April 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


But this album... it is so complex and demands attention in literary ways. I love them both (all of them really) but this one feels special to me.
posted by hippybear at 10:13 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


Is The Dreaming anyone here’s fav? Cuz that’s mine <3

That's my fave as well !
posted by Pendragon at 11:44 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


Don't forget this little ditty she threw together.
posted by senor biggles at 11:48 PM on April 2, 2018


I didn't warm up to this album till I started the cassette on side B.
posted by NemesisVex at 12:10 AM on April 3, 2018


This is my favorite Kate Bush album, partly for sentimental reasons, partly because it's just amazing.

I came rather late to Kate Bush, didn't really start listening to her regularly until I was in my thirties. I hadn't listened ot this album, however, until I started dating my current partner. She was listening to it a lot during the time we were getting together, so this album is linked to a special time in my life.

Also, this one time I was driving in Iceland with my partner on a beautiful sunny day and the radio was on. Then someone called in and requested that the DJ play The Sensual World. The DJ didn't know the song but put it on anyway and we just listened without talking, turning the familiar landscape into something magical. I'm always transported back to that moment when listening to that song.
posted by Kattullus at 12:38 AM on April 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


It's not from this album, but please put it on my permanent record that my favorite Kate Bush song is "Night of the Swallow."
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:24 AM on April 3, 2018 [9 favorites]


The Dreaming is my absolutely favourite Kate Bush album (with the exception of the title song; I don't really like her vocals on that). This album is also my favourite, as are every other Kate Bush albums I've heard (which is most of them except for some of the later ones that I'll be getting around to directly).
posted by h00py at 1:34 AM on April 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


Of particular note is the leading track, ”Flower of the Mountain”, a reworking of “The Sensual World” which restores Bush’s original intent to use excerpts from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses for the lyrics, the rights to which she was unable to secure at the time “The Sensual World” was recorded.

As with the Director's Cut version of "Deeper Understanding," I strongly prefer the unimprovable original. The various constraints of budget, available technology and unwilling licensors seem only to have sharpened Kate's ability to land a feeling — but then, IMO, being given completely free rein only very rarely helps creators.
posted by adamgreenfield at 3:09 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


Rocket's Tail gives me feels.

Every. Single. Time.
posted by flabdablet at 3:21 AM on April 3, 2018 [5 favorites]


Yesss. Love and Anger is one of my high school favs and like every five years I rediscover it all over again.
posted by soren_lorensen at 3:32 AM on April 3, 2018


This was the first Kate Bush album I bought, at a CD fair in London in 1991, and it's still my favourite, although Aerial comes close (disc 2 is my favourite KB of all, but disc 1 is merely very good). The use of Irish sounds and Trio Bulgarka makes for such a complete, self-contained soundscape. It was baffling to me to encounter KB online forums circa 2000 and see fans dismissing her post-Hounds of Love albums; when I picked up The Dreaming and Hounds of Love because they were supposedly so much better, I couldn't hear it (although they're both great, of course). I suspect almost any KB album makes a good enough starting point for a new listener... well, maybe not Lionheart.
posted by rory at 3:56 AM on April 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


I was sitting here thinking about what to say about Deeper Understanding, and I realized that I love it in the same way I love Cloudbusting, like if there were some organized shelf inside my head where I arrange the songs that play in there all day, there would be a shelf for explain what it feels like to be swept away by obsession, and these two songs would be there.

I am trying to remember whether I bought this, or whether it was a gift, but that sent me down a nostalgic rabbit-hole about college, and rec.music.gaffa, and discovering a secret network of fans who seemed eager to distribute bootlegs with carefully hand-drawn covers, all these things that I'd never seen before with any other artist, which just added to the fascination, an army of Kate-worshipers.
posted by mittens at 4:37 AM on April 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


If you know anybody else who can sing like that, I bet you don't.

Kitka Women's Vocal Ensemble have been doing this for nearly 40 years. They're from Oakland.
posted by scruss at 5:39 AM on April 3, 2018


For me this dovetails with the recent post about one's favorite music being set in teenage years since that postulate never held for me. I love Kate Bush's music, The Dreaming and Aerial being my favorites, but didn't start listening to her until I was close to 30.

When I first heard Aerial I thought it was too subdued, but came to need it in my life after a decade of occasional listening.
posted by Radiophonic Oddity at 6:34 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


Reading all your comments makes me feel like Rin watching Kagamihara eat. /squee
posted by sydnius at 7:34 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


hippybear! I've been wondering which of my favorite albums you would do next!

I loved this album. I have to admit that Hounds of Love is my all-time favorite Kate Bush album because it was the first album of hers I heard and I would play the cassette over and over and over again. But this album is less accessible in a way that I loved.

When I was 25 I was deeply inspired by Hermann Hesse's Siddharta, and I decided to quit the world and spend some time following a river. I ended up choosing the Arno and Tiber, and spent 6 weeks walking from Pisa to Florence to Rome. There are many indelible memories from that trip, and one of my favorites was walking on top of a footpath next to the Arno as the farmers were were burning the fields. These lines from Never Be Mine sprang immediately into my head:

The smell of burning fields
Will now mean you and here
And this is where I want to be
This is what I need
This is where I want to be
But I know that this will never be mine


And so it has been ever since. Any time I smell burning fields I hear the song in my head and I am immediately transported to that day, in the golden Italian sunlight, with my hiking boots, my 60-lb backpack, and the distinctive scent in my nose, and the knowing that this was a peak moment in my life. It's so rare that you're aware of those moments as they're happening, but that time I knew it. And both the song and the scent immediately trigger that memory for me.

So thank you once again, hippybear, for a warm flush of memories to brighten my Tuesday morning at work.
posted by widdershins at 7:46 AM on April 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


RS: Just to conclude, you said earlier that the making of this album and the years of work that have gone into this, that one thing that came out of it, you did learn a lot about yourself. What sort of things have you learnt about yourself over the past three or four years?

Kate: Um, well that's a very "up front" question there, Roger! And I suppose, I don't think I would have said after the last album "this is just an album". That's a very important thing for me to have learnt: I am very obsessive about my work. I spend most of my time working, and I think this is something that I've really looked at in the last few years: there's a lot more to life than just working and just making an album. It is just an album, it's just a part of my life. It's not my Life. And I think it was, you know... making albums was my life and it doesn't feel like that is any more. And that's tremendous, the sense of freedom that that gives me. It's so good and I think it's really healthy and much better for me, to try and put these things into perspective, you know.


- a very charming Radio One interview with Kate from 1989
posted by roger ackroyd at 8:01 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is one of the brilliant albums I am glad to have in my collection. At one point, I had the This Woman's Work boxed set, and had to sell it for food money, which is why I ever am happy for Apple Music.

There are amazing songs on this album, even if one song of hers that will always make my eyes well up is not on it. It's just.. I don't want to say "ethereal", or "majestic", or any of a hundred adjectives. It's merely (ha!) building a world around us and letting us take a step into it.

I love it because of how her voice keeps maturing, and her lyrics keep maturing. Listen to "The Kick Inside", especially the original release of "Wuthering Heights", and then listen to The Sensual World, and marvel as she shows that you may have to get the experience of years, but you don't need to get the weight of them.

(No, for that, you need the song I mentioned above: "Moments of Pleasure" from The Red Shoes.)
posted by mephron at 8:14 AM on April 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


I was wondering where The Sensual World stands today in people's rankings of Bush's albums, so did a quick search. Most recent lists put it somewhere in the middle of her 10 studio albums (or 9, depending whether they count Director's Cut). Here's the NME in 2014:

1. Hounds of Love (1985)
2. Aerial (2005)
3. The Sensual World (1989)
4. The Dreaming (1982)
5. Never For Ever (1980)
6. 50 Words For Snow (2011)
7. The Kick Inside (1978)
8. Director’s Cut (2011)
9. The Red Shoes (1993)
10. Lionheart (1978)

And BBC America in 2014:

1. Hounds of Love (1985)
2. The Kick Inside (1978)
3. Aerial (2005)
4. The Sensual World (1989)
5. 50 Words for Snow (2011)
6. The Dreaming (1982)
7. Never For Ever (1980)
8. The Red Shoes (1993)
9. Lionheart (1978)

There was a Guardian reader poll in 2011:

34% Hounds of Love
21% The Dreaming
14% Aerial
9% The Kick Inside
7% The Sensual World
7% 50 Words for Snow
4% Never for Ever
2% Lionheart
1% The Red Shoes
0% Director's Cut

The public's ranking at besteveralbums.com:

1. Hounds of Love
2. The Dreaming
3. The Kick Inside
4. Aerial
5. The Sensual World
6. 50 Words For Snow
7. Never For Ever
8. Lionheart
9. The Red Shoes
(10. The Whole Story)
11. Director's Cut

And at ranker.com:

1. Hounds of Love
2. The Dreaming
3. The Kick Inside
4. Aerial
5. The Sensual World
6. Never for Ever
7. 50 Words for Snow
8. The Red Shoes
9. Lionheart
10. Director's Cut

Something like a consensus, then: The Sensual World is considered somewhere between fifth and third out of ten. But wait! Here's Stereogum in 2013:

1. The Sensual World
2. Hounds of Love
3. Never For Ever
4. The Kick Inside
5. 50 Words for Snow
6. Aerial
7. Director's Cut
8. The Red Shoes
9. The Dreaming
10. Lionheart

Yesss! Except that their low ranking for The Dreaming casts the list in some doubt, as does their comment on Aerial that the first CD "is the more visceral (and engaging) of the two discs". And who puts 50 Words higher than Aerial? Not Kate Bush, to judge by the focus of Before the Dawn.
posted by rory at 8:16 AM on April 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


In the dictionary next to the word 'frisson' you will find a picture of Kate Bush.
posted by Splunge at 9:04 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


> hippybear:
"Samisdata has better drugs than I do."

Nah, it was more a response to the "If you haven't heard it, hear it. If you have heard it, hear it again" thing.
posted by Samizdata at 9:23 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


Back during the 80's I used to have a seriously be-postered apartment. Most of one wall of my living room was dedicated to one of those giant promotional posters for Hounds of Love. Her head was around the size of my torso. This was a good thing.
posted by Samizdata at 9:26 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


I poured through the dark on long lonely drives to this, across whole states to this, flipped the cassette to this, flipped the cassette to this, flipped the cassette to this.
posted by pracowity at 12:48 PM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


Samizdata, I picked up what you were puttin’ down.
posted by greermahoney at 3:00 PM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


Speaking of warm flushes of memory, I had to test a hypothesis. I haven't listened to Running Up That Hill in at least a decade. I can STILL sing along flawlessly.
posted by Samizdata at 8:21 PM on April 3, 2018


And Cloudbusting almost flawlessly (he says as the YT playlist moves on).
posted by Samizdata at 8:26 PM on April 3, 2018


And, although I admittedly have the color right, I want Donald Sutherland's hair out of that video.
posted by Samizdata at 8:29 PM on April 3, 2018


Donald Sutherland looks so good in that video all over.

But then, he's a Very Handsome Man (even clean shaven).
posted by hippybear at 8:42 PM on April 3, 2018


I was introduced to Kate Bush in 1990, via The Whole Story. It was all I had of her for several years (and is why I do not understand those of her fans who don't like the new vocals of Wuthering Heights ... it was The Whole Story's version that made me fall in love with her). The Sensual World and The Red Shoes are the other two of her albums I own. Three amazing albums.
posted by lhauser at 9:30 PM on April 3, 2018


"The smell of burning fields . . will now mean you and here. . ."

This is one of the most evocative songs ever for me, for very different reasons than widdershins upthread - I left my best childhood friend in Germany, surrounded by fields, to a marriage that was obviously not going to work out. I moved to San Francisco where people grew colder and turned to their computers. Hmm. This album wasn't my gateway Bush or my favorite (have to go with side 2 of Hounds of Love, or Sky of Honey, for that), but it meant SO much.
posted by goofyfoot at 10:31 PM on April 3, 2018


The Sensual World and The Red Shoes are the other two of her albums I own. Three amazing albums.

I love The Red Shoes too. "Rubberband Girl", "Eat the Music", "Moments of Pleasure", all great. More Trio Bulgarka. What's not to like? Sure, I can see why it might appear lower down people's rankings of her albums, but that doesn't make it a bad album.
posted by rory at 5:12 AM on April 4, 2018


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