Hounds of Love (2018

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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. That leaves the recent 2018 remaster, which was done by Pink Floyd engineer James Guthrie in collaboration with Bush. 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!

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! I believe she has an extremely clear impression of the atmosphere she wants to create. How she achieves that involves the experimentation, but she has an incredible, innate sense of what works for a song,” Haydn Bendall, one of the many engineers who worked on the album told Thompson. “[On Hounds Of Love] we were using Fairlight and Linn drums a lot, and they’d come out with these funny little sounds which you might think weren’t very interesting, and she’d say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful, isn’t that great?’ She’d make it great, and in a way that’s the mark of a genius, to make something fabulous out of a simple idea. She’ll just have a little kernel of an idea that would develop into a huge blossom.”Released in August 1985, “Running Up That Hill” reached number three on the U.K. singles chart and number 30 on the U.S. Hot 100, Bush’s highest U.S. chart position since 1978. The single’s success gave the album a boost when it was released a month later, reaching number one on the U.K. charts and number 30 on the Billboard 200. It was also a success in Canada and across Europe, selling over a million albums worldwide. For those interested, I did compare several original vinyl rips to the 1985 CDs, and both formats seem to share the same Cooper mastering. 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.

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. In the years since, The Dreaming has received a critical reevaluation and come to be regarded as a underrated classic. At the time, however, it was seen as a dagger through Bush’s commercial viability. As Thompson summarized in his excellent biography: “[ The Dreaming] had cost her a fortune, way beyond the advance she received, took her a year of almost solid recording, hopping around studios and between engineers, and it had pushed her to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. The company hated it and it killed her as a singles artists for four years.”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!) For the objective bit: used Musicscope to analyse, here is a comparison of the 1985 Japan disc of Hounds with the CD box set of Hounds, 2018 remaster. In 1992, Bush remembered the release of Hounds of Love as one of the greatest moments of her career: On her next outing, Never for Ever, Bush took over the production reigns with the help of engineer Jon Kelly. It was a major step in Bush’s assertion artistic independence. “Obviously the production is such a big part of what the song is,” she told Claude Van Heye in 2005. “It’s every bit as much what the song is as the lyric and...I mean, it is the song.”

Sonically, it’s easy to give the 2018 remaster the TBVO crown. However, the aforementioned presence of the single mix of “The Big Sky,” rather than the original album mix, might be a deal breaker for some fans. The differences are subtle, but I prefer the single mix. However, placing it on the remaster is clearly an act of historical revisionism. Ultimately, the sonic edge of the 2018 remaster makes it worth seeking out even for those who prefer the album mix of “The Big Sky.” Just hold on to your original CD for the original mix. 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. With traces of classical, operatic, tribal and twisted pop styles, Kate creates music that observes no boundaries of musical structure or inner expression…. With no plans to tour America, Kate is likely to remain obscure on this side of the Atlantic. While her eclecticism is welcomed and rewarded in her homeland her genius goes ignored here — a situation that is truly a shame for an artist so adventurous and naturally theatrical. Despite its sonic limitations and clunky interface, Bush used the Fairlight to transform her already highly idiosyncratic take on piano-based singer-songwriting into something wholly unique and largely indescribable. “Discovering the Fairlight gave me a whole new writing tool, as well as an arranging tool…,” Bush explained in 1990, “With a Fairlight you’ve got everything, a tremendous range of things. It completely opened me up to sounds and textures, and I could experiment with these in a way I could never have done without it.”I am a Lady Gaga fan, and our music tastes are very varied compare to some fanbases! I see Kate Bush in Lady Gaga a lot (not the other way round, obviously)...the theatrics, how certain songs are sung! Similar women, except one excels, and I'm not afraid to admit that as a Lady Gaga fan!! Following the disappointing reception of The Dreaming, Bush retreated from the public eye. “It took me four or five months to be able even to write again,” she told the Daily Mail in 1985. “It’s very difficult when you’ve been working for years, doing one album after another. You need fresh things to stimulate you. I decided to take a bit of the summer out and spend time with my boyfriend and with my family and friends, just relaxing. Not being Kate Bush the singer; just being myself.” 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?” Unlike the 1997 remaster, there’s no problem with compression on the new Guthrie/Bush remaster. On some songs, the 1985 CDs have slightly higher R128 numbers, while on others the 2018 remaster’s numbers are higher. Overall the 1985 CDs score either a 12 or a 13 DR, while the 2018 remaster is a 12 DR. In other words, Guthrie and Bush did an excellent job preserving the album’s original dynamic range. When necessary, Har-Bal’s loudness matching option, which doesn’t affect the frequency response, was used to create clearer graphs.