2/18/2023 0 Comments Kate bush hounds of love cover![]() ![]() Inhabiting another’s subjectivity is both an erotic and gothic trope, things brought together in the title song of Hounds of Love, which samples dialogue from the 1957 British horror film, Night of the Demon (also known as Curse of the Demon). These include a bank robber, Houdini’s wife, a young soldier, and, more recently, a person in love with a snowman. But her songs are also theatrical in the sense that they so often represent characters who are obviously not Bush. Like David Bowie before her (though more so), Bush is essentially theatrical, as her two short stints of live performance (in 19) illustrated. Such restraint can be heard on the eponymous song, which brilliantly uses cello parts where one would expect electric guitar and bass. (Indeed, its one major misstep is when The Big Sky lapses into bombastic repetition). While “restrained” might not be a word often associated with Bush (so theatrical, so intense, such a perfectionist), Hounds of Love benefits from an exceptional musical restraint. However, it reined in many of the excesses of the genre, thus rendering its ambition and experimentation more accessible and palatable to a mainstream audience. As Ron Moy argues in his 2007 book on the album, Hounds of Love isĬlassically prog in broad conceptual and often musical terms. But the musical symmetry of the cycle’s opening and closing notes complements the lyrics’ repeated use of oppositional imagery, such as under/over in/out up/down microcosmic/macrocosmic and so on.Ĭomplete with an epigraph from Tennyson, this second side smuggles in a musical style - prog rock - whose stocks were at their lowest ebb during the post-punk years. In between is an extraordinary mélange of styles, melodic invention, and timbres. The cycle begins with two notes (a rising perfect fifth), an interval that is conspicuously inverted (into a falling perfect fifth) at the cycle’s end. ![]()
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