A Film Canon

Despite featuring some of Bush's strongest moments, Hounds Of Love ultimately feels like an apology for the outstanding idiosyncrasies of The Dreaming, and an attempt to renew her standing with a public alienated from its 'weirdness'. To that end, the A-side, Hounds Of Love, features a collection of fairly accessible pop songs, including "Running Up That Hill", "Hounds Of Love" and "Cloudbusting", all of which are lyrically, instrumentally and compositionally impressive, but refrain from the vocal pyrotechnics of the earlier album, with the exception of such isolated moments as the chorus of "The Big Sky" - "You never understood me/ You never really tried" - whose reproach seems to go beyond its ostensibly romantic subject matter. The B-side, The Ninth Wave, is a collection of songs about women drowning, or lost at sea and, at first glance, would seem to represent both an experimental and vocal counterbalance to the A-side, especially since Bush's voice might best be described as a malicious fludity, threatening to overwhelm both her and the listener with its amorphous, affronting metamorphoses. However, the result is too close to an electronic soundscape to take advantage of the extent to which Bush's voice is itself such a soundscape, making her own vocals seem curiously redundant - as if the allegory were in fact of her own commodification, or transformation, into a palatable presence. That said, the horrific distortions of "Waking The Witch" shock the listener out of complacency, while the shorter tracks ("And Dream Of Sheep", "Under Ice" and "The Morning Fog") restore Bush with some qualified agency, as do isolated segments of "Hello Earth" and "Jig Of Life".