To say Kate Bush's album releases have been sporadic would be quite the understatement. Before 2005's Aerial, it had been twelve painstaking years before anyone had enjoyed a studio release from the English songstress. Now, in 2011 fans have been treated to not only Director's Cut in the first half of the year, an album of restructured and reissued tracks from two previous albums. But as Winter closes in around the Northern Hemisphere, Bush has swept the world with a breathtakingly bleak yet surprisingly temperate studio album in the form of 50 Words For Snow.
At first glance the tracklisting might look as bare as a Winter chill, but with only one track clocking in at under seven minutes, Bush has taken her time with every aspect of the album. Her website first alerted fans to the fact the album would be "set against the backdrop of falling snow", and begins her wintry opus with Snowflake, about the falling of a single flake and its desire to be caught. The distant rolling of piano chords coupled with the faintest hint of electronics serves to emphasise the loneliness felt by a single snowflake amongst a drifting blizzard. That snowflake is given a rousing voice by Bush's son Bertie, calling out amidst the echoing atmosphere and blending fluidly with his mother's backing vocals.
Of course Snowflake could be about a lost pet, caught in a snowstorm, as the next luxuriant track, Lake Tahoe, finds a woman calling out for her own Snowflake amid a lolling piano, lakeside bird calls, faint percussion and choral accompaniment from Stefan Roberts. Misty starts with the creation of a snowman innocently enough, but subverts into something altogether more bittersweetly erotic as she lays down with him and feels him "dissolve" beneath her. Only Bush could get away with singing about the coupling between woman and snowman and it would be somewhat creepy if not for the way her simply beautiful and sumptuous voice conjures up the imagery in a strangely alluring display.
Wild Man goes further and altogether darker as the blistering winds give way to a lament for the "Kangchenjumga demon," or Yeti of the Himalayas. It tells a fantastical tale of many well-researched place names where Bush sings of sightings of the eponymous wild man, and her attempts to protect him from discovery and death with the help of a Himalayan tracker sung by Andy Fairweather Low. A bizarrely forgettable and overly-romantic duet with Elton John sees two seemingly time-travelling lovers proclaiming their love while Rome burns, or as one is dragged away in war torn 1942, before losing one another during 9/11 in New York.
If such a duet with Elton John seems bizarre, then hearing Stephen Fry recite 50 different way to convey snowfall over a fusion of chillout electronica and slide guitar is altogether comedic. The relish with which Fry sounds out the different terms ("diamanti pavlova" and "spangladasha" being the more sedate of them) is evident. Bush encouraging Fry to complete the 50 as part of her chorus is a stroke of light-hearted genius. If you're going to get anyone to revel in the glorious nonsense of language then I suppose there's no one better than the most famous linguist of them all.
The lounging piano returns for Among Angels to round out the album, with Bush alone in reminding us (if a reminder were needed) of her vocal range and haunting solo presence. 50 Words For Snow is a peculiarity, but of course what else could a Kate Bush record be? Few albums in recent memory have focused on a single subject matter so incessantly, and it does indeed evoke a stark and boreal landscape. Yet it is Bush's voice that brings the consistent warmth throughout each track, thawing them out and allowing us to savour her otherwise glacial offerings.
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