Running Up That Hill' is obviously the highlight, and I'm not basing this solely on the fact it's her most well-known single! (I wouldn't say 'Wuthering Heights' is because Running always charts, more radio-friendly, and so on!) This by far beats out any Madonna or Lady Gaga album (I'm a fan of Madonna's music, not her, but I am a 17-year-old dedicated Little Monster of Queen Gaga!) Or just about any female album! Following Gabriel’s lead, Bush banned the use of cymbals and hi-hats on Never for Ever. “I always felt there was this slightly sort of MOR quality to hi-hats,” she explained. “It just sounded a bit passé. So that was one of the key things, make sure there’s no hi-hats.” Instead, Bush sampled aerosol can sprays with the Fairlight to deploy in the sonic space usually occupied by hi-hats. This album was the album that opened my eyes to how influential, creative & diverse music used to be!

Disjunctive, idiosyncratic and so very, very inventive, Kate Bush's 1985 magnum opus, "Hounds of Love", was the intentionally streamlined yet defiant response to complaints regarding her efficiency in the studio and detractors of the lyrical and structural esotericism inherent in her work. Greatly emboldened by the advances of the digital age, the ever-experimental Bush went one further, building a home studio and developing her latest new material to her satisfaction, subsequently dividing the end product into two distinctive sections. Even under contemporaneous scrutiny, both parts, replete with layered electronic instrumentation, sound effects, and expressive yet refined vocal acrobatics, successfully cohere, and, if persevered with, the full measure still holds up and works incredibly well despite its ambitious structure. Waking the Witch' is bloody amazing, I love the beginning dialogues, and the last minute and a half! This song is the core song of what her tour is based on! When Kate Bush decamped to her newly installed home studio in 1983 to begin recording Hounds of Love, the focus of the fourth TBVO, her career was at a crossroads.

Barcode and Other Identifiers

For those interested, I did compare several original vinyl rips to the 1985 CDs, and both formats seem to share the same Cooper mastering. I now listen to the likes of Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie (Lady Gaga inspired this choice mostly), and so on, due to this album! O]ur Kate’s a genius, the rarest solo artist this country’s ever produced. She makes sceptics dance to her tune. The company’s daughter has truly screwed the system and produced the best album of the year doing it.

Speaking of her tendency to revisit and revise old works — which culminated in the 2011 release of Director’s Cut, an album of reworkings of her old songs — Bush explained, “[T]hat’s all part of hopefully…a continuing process that you can take into the next record and maybe try and correct it and not make the same mistakes again. But it’s very hard because, of course, we all tend to repeat mistakes, don’t we?” Hounds of Love" set the tone for Bush's extraordinary career, demarcating her as a true visionary. And though it may be her watershed moment, the album, its classic singles and accompanying videos are part of a conceptual cycle that would continue with her later, more underrated records, presenting further autobiographical subject matter, romantic imagery and studio wizardry.

While that may be true for mere mortals, the trajectory of Bush’s career between her second album and Hounds of Love was one of constant refinement and fixing mistakes, culminating in one of the best albums of the 1980s and, arguably, Bush’s greatest work.

Interestingly, the EQ the 2018 remasters is very close to the EQ used for the 2014 Audio Fidelity vinyl release, based on a comparison of the former and a hi-res rip of the latter. In her early use of the Fairlight, Bush prefigured production techniques that would become more and more common as the use of computers in music advanced. “She responded instinctively to all the sonic and cultural implications of the Fairlight,” John Walters, who helped Bush program the Fairlight, told biographer Graeme Thompson. “She was naturally ahead of her time and, of course, went on to do much more with it as the instrument developed. She made the most of it for her own idiosyncratic music.” Seriously, though, great analysis, and I'm really curious to audition it against my Japan mini-LP version (which uses the original '85 mastering).

Recommendations

With Hounds of Love, Bush had taken full artistic control and made the most of it. “I’d seen other artists self-produce and more often than not, it doesn’t come out very well,” Killing Joke bassist Youth, who played on Hounds of Love, told Van Heye. “Occasionally, you can get a masterpiece, and I think Hounds Of Love is one.” Hear, hear! Upon close listening, it’s apparent that the 2018 remaster has a greater degree of depth and clarity than the 1985 CDs. 5 The sound stage on the Guthrie/Bush remaster is deeper, and the remaster evinces greater micro detail than the 1985 mastering, despite not being EQ’d to be brighter. Likely, this greater resolution is the result of a better transfer using more recent analog-to-digital conversion technology. While fans have spotted a few minor errors elsewhere in the 2018 remasters, the Hounds of Love remaster done by Bush and Guthrie is spotless.