Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 07/11/05
Label: EMI

In a word: astonishing. Kate Bush's return after 12 years is as eccentric, brainy and bold as you would expect. But it's equally pretentious, monotonous and disappointing. Split across two CDs - the more conventional, accessible chapter, "A Sea of Honey" and the second, more freeform, classically-inspired "A Sky Of Honey" - even her most ardent subjects would concede "Aerial" is a more satisfying album intellectually than it is musically.

You have to take your trilby off to an artist who, in 2005, makes an album that is as inspired by Steve Reich and Ralph Vaughan Williams as it is Pink Floyd, that alludes to "Citizen Kane", Elvis and Joan Of Arc, and bears more meaningful symbols than the Highway Code. Even if its melodies are so low-key and impressionistic as to be negligible, its pace relentlessly down-tempo and riddled with dated soft rock beats, and its overall tone one of complacent, Zen-like wisdom. Flight; art; the cycles of day and night and life and death; and domesticity - all are key themes, and Bush's quiet family-based existence on the South Devon coast is heavily mined to illustrate them.

This can be problematic - "A Sea Of Honey", at times focuses perturbingly closely on the humdrum. Sparse piano solo "Mrs Bertolozzi", for instance, tells of an afternoon cleaning mud off the floor and doing laundry. Naturally the bathos has a purpose (you detect some marital strife going on between the lines) but how Bush didn't burst out laughing when recording the lines "Washing machine/ Washing machine/ Washing machine!/ Swishy swoshy/ Swishy swoshy..." is anyone's guess. You will.

"Bertie", too, an Elizabethan-style madrigal to her young son, is a moment of mad, maternal gushiness ("Luvverly, luvverly, luvverly, luvverly Bertie") that you almost want to shake her for, fuel as it is to those male arguments about motherhood softening the female brain. Yet its musical charm saves the day - definitely the only Couperin pastiche you'll hear on a mainstream pop record this decade.

Bush's classical influences stretch further on "A Sky Of Honey", a conceptual suite that begins and ends in the morning, with sampled birdsong. "Can you see the lark ascending?" she asks in "Prologue" in an explicit reference to early 20th century English composer Vaughan Williams. Old friend Rolf Harris pops up on "A Painter's Dream" (he played didgeridoo on 1982's "The Dreaming"). It concludes with the title track, a euphoric disco-rock wig-out.

The most memorable song on either album is "Pi", a mysterious, beguiling, Steve Reichy organ-and-acoustic guitar-backed elegy to a mathematician, on which said number (3.14159 etc) is dreamily recited, ad infinitum. It treads shakily the line between piss-taking and groundbreaking - a good epitaph for this whole curious affair.

    by Anna Britten