50 Words For Snow
| Kate Bush
50 Words For Snow
50 Words for Snow is the tenth studio album by English singer-songwriter Kate Bush. It is the second album to be released on her own label, Fish People. It is her first all-new studio album since Aerial from 2005, and marks the first time since 1978 that she has released two new albums in one year. The album spawned one single, "Wild Man", which was released as a download to promote the album. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
haunting and gorgeous. Like so much of her best music, it's filled with deep story-songs that have the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space-- not so much innocent as open to the imagination-- that never gets old.
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The Guardian
to just listen to an album that, like the weather it celebrates, gets under your skin and into your bones.
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NME
To hope for a ‘Running Up That Hill’ or a ‘Wuthering Heights’ would be to miss the point, and the subtle pleasures – there’s enough people walking the ways Kate cleared 30 years ago. Follow her footprints off the beaten path, and you’ll find some weird winter wonders.
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Consequence of Sound
A sense of dialogue is where 50 Words For Snow picks up, but this time it revisits another theme of Bush’s: nature. Using snow as a kind of landscape, it provides a sparse, beautiful, and ultimately pure backdrop for her creativity to soar.
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Telegraph
To let her quietly beautiful 10th album whisk you away you need a more reflective setting. 50 Words for Snow should be heard standing alone at icy window panes, gazing out. Its seven long, snow-themed songs swirl around a delicate core of Bush and her piano. The dreamy, drifting mood and subtle melodic motifs recall The Ninth Wave, the watery-themed second side of The Hounds of Love (1985).
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BBC Music
50 Words for Snow may threaten to lose its way in the blizzard sometimes, but it is moments like these – jolting us from her world for a moment, reminding us of how all-embracing her talent can be – that show just how much she can move us with her fire and ice.
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Slant Magazine
50 Words for Snow is a success not only because it’s so challengingly bold and peculiar, but because it repackages Bush’s usual idiosyncrasies in an entirely new form. It succeeds as a transitional work, but first and foremost as its own singular world—a hushed, magnificent snow globe full of strange stories and characters.
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Chicago Tribune
True to form, “50 Words for Snow” floats in its own enchanted cloud, a song cycle for subzero shut-ins. Each song tosses another blanket atop a feather bed, another log on a fire, a series of stories to send the imagination drifting as winter closes in.
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Drowned in Sound
Bush has always been best at her most focussed, and here she delves monomaniacally into snow and the winter – its mythology, its romance, its darkness, its rhythmic frenzy and glacial creep. 50 Words for Snow is artic and hoare frost and robin red breast, sleepy snowscapes and death on the mountain, drifts in the Home Counties and gales through Alaska.
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Louder Than War
'50 Words For Snow' is Kate Bush’s finest moment, a pinnacle in a career of pinnacles.
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The Independent
a fitting climax to a seasonal offering that manages to evoke the essential spirit of winter while avoiding all the dog-eared clichés of Christmas albums – or indeed, any overt mention of that particular fairy story. Which is some achievement.
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The Quietus
undoubtedly whimsical, but it's played and arranged so exquisitely that even the most po-faced should be able to acknowledge the scale of its achievement.
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Pop Matters
Here more than ever, Bush’s songs exist in the place where reality and fantasy meet and neither quite assumes form. It’s a place where snowmen indulge in one night stands and the Yeti lurks barely out of reach. The point isn’t that the Eskimos don’t know 50 words for snow. It’s that Kate Bush does.
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Music Feeds
Bush’s voice, after all these years, is astonishingly preserved — listening to her precision on this record is often the aural equivalent of cutting glass with a diamond. T
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Sputnik Music
Simply put: 50 Words for Snow is as far from pop as Kate Bush has dared to venture, but her artistry has reached its peak.
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Music OMH
Like all of her most significant work, [50 Words For Snow] reinvents her as an artist, yet is utterly, distinctively her voice.
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Clash Magazine
What really makes you go weak at the knees [about 50 Words], though, is her imagination. Who else writes songs about a tryst with a snowman (‘Misty’), a dog’s dreamland reunion with its comatose owner (‘Lake Tahoe’) or an elusive quasi-human creature in West Bengal (‘Wild Man’)?
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TIME
While looking for 50 Words For Snow, she has found 50 other original ways to express herself effortlessly, creating another intriguing piece of work. In 1980, she sang that “December Will Be Magic Again;” in 2011, she has made it so.
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NZ Herald
It sounds fruity but rather than being obscure and difficult, it all knits together beautifully. Rolling, repeated piano lines, flourishes of strings and synths, delicate guitar parts, and some poignant, gentle percussion and drums by Steve Gadd fill the soundscape.
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QRO Magazine
Bush’s latest album takes a while to sink in, but once it does, you realize that she’s in top form with 50 Words For Snow.
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AllMusic
50 Words for Snow engages the natural world and myth -- both Eastern and Western -- and fantasy. It is abstract, without being the least bit difficult to embrace.
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Subjective Sounds
This is an album you will want to listen to with the best speakers or headphone setup you own. In-fact, as good as my main stereo system is, headphone listening truly allows you to hear more of the music.
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The A.V. Club
The music on 50 Words isn’t straightforward, but its concept is. In fact, the snow motif is the album’s one on-the-nose element: Six of the seven songs dwell on some allusive interpretation of wintry weather.
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Beat Magazine
Kate Bush is the only female artist to have had an album in the top five UK album charts during each of the last five decades. This impressive feat is testimony to the success of her eclectic musical style; however her tenth studio album 50 Words For Snow limits perhaps her greatest asset - her idiosyncratic voice.
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Los Angeles Times
All that adoration in the ether must’ve stirred the reclusive British singer-songwriter to create not just one album this year — “Director’s Cut,” a reinterpretation of songs from “The Sensual World” and “The Red Shoes” — but also a second one, “50 Words for Snow,” an art-song cycle that veers from delicate to blustery but always with a sheen of elegance.
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NPR Music
Each song on Snow grows as if from magic beans from the lush ground of the singer-songwriter's keyboard parts. The music is immersive but spacious, jazz-tinged and lushly electronic – the 53-year-old Bush, a prime inspiration for tech-savvy young auteurs ranging from St. Vincent to hip-hop's Big Boi, pioneered the use of digital samplers in the 1980s and is still an avid aural manipulator.
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SPIN
The overall dark, diaphanous sound here almost oversells the title, but it’s impossible not to get lost in the drift.
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Tiny Mix Tapes
The story she uncovers is one of beautiful and irreducible inevitability: we’re snowflakes, all of us, destined to melt but meanwhile falling toward one another, unstoppably toward ourselves.
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Digital Spy
How much of the last six years has been spent working on these seven new songs isn't known, but every second was worth it. Don't be fooled by the sparse tracklisting; the disc clocks in at over 65 minutes, making up a dense, daft, delightful record based around the white stuff.
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Soundblab
This creative outpouring from the grand queen of art-pop is one in the eye for those who were in any doubt that she is still as relevant and original as ever, while young upstart Bush-alikes like Florence + the Machine have already lost their creativity and flair.
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Paste Magazine
“50 Words for Snow” is…well…exactly what it says it is: Bush counting to 50 in a gorgeous bath of flange, while guest speaker Stephen Fry lists a half-hundred translations of the same word—all layered over the heady rhythmic rush of Giblin’s nimble bass and Gadd’s stacked percussion. It’s a linguistic lesson you never asked for, or even wanted, but also one you’ll never forget.
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Backseat Mafia
50 Words for Snow is certainly not Kate Bush’s best album by any stretch of the imagination, but it does underline that even her least impressive albums are still better than most at their very best.
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Daily Mail
50 Words For Snow is totally fresh. A sprawling song cycle with a wintry theme, the hour-long album features seven story-songs set against a backdrop of falling snow.
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Herald Sun
It's classic Kate Bush - a wintry, glacial concept album with seven songs, 65 minutes and zero concession to 2012. Single Wild Man is far too classy, and frankly far too brilliantly bonkers, to trouble the charts or radio playlists . .
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MTV UK
As ever, Bush's voice is a marvellously unique and sensual instrument. She plays the part of many of the characters who inhabit 50 Words' worlds, channelling their words as if performing a seance, yet manages to keep the process gimmick free and entirely natural.
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NOW Magazine
Best are Bush's vocals, distinctly lower now but as brilliant and playful as ever. She grumbles, coos, burrs and wails, drawing out syllables with such devastating intensity, it's hard to resist drifting into her darkly whimsical winter world. One of the year's most imaginative albums.
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Lip Magazine
For hardcore fans, Kate Bush’s new album delivers. For those who are new to her music, it requires patience and perseverance. Her imaginary world, and the sheer length of the songs on the track may alienate those who are looking for songs that they’ll immediately connect with.
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Under the Radar
It's tricky, when describing concepts of 50 Words for Snow, not to make it sound like a novelty album. - because it's really not. It is a beautifully executed record of well-paced and thoughtful storytelling. Bush's mostly austere compositions lend themselves well to the classical elements that will be well worth revisiting when the long, dark, cold nights arrive.
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Newfound
It is Bush’s expansive and poetic—in the deepest meaning—sense of snow that I appreciate the most about this album . . .
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Louder Sound
a more supple and experimental affair, with a contemporary chamber-pop sound grounded in crisp piano, minimal percussion and light-touch electronics.
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Utne Reader
Kate Bush does some of her best storytelling in this winter-themed album.
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The Boston Globe
Fitting for a work called “50 Words for Snow,’’ Kate Bush’s 10th album moves with the velocity and grace of a glacier.
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The Skinny
As on 2005’s Aerial, it’s 50 Words for Snow’s improbable fusion of drama, magic and absurdity that makes it so compelling. Musically, the uncannily soft, blurry edges of that record return, underpinning Bush's mysterious ability to create atmospheres simultaneously sublime and understated.
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RTE
[50 Words is] . . . an album that may prove the perfect comedown after another aural pummelling from Florence Welch. It also captures the serenity and quietude of a landscape blanketed with snow with calm and wonder. Proof once again that Kate Bush is as unique and individual as a snowflake.
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Velocities in Music
The music is so well-written and controlled, but it is a bit limited by how specific the sound is– for example, there is probably only a 3-month period of the year where you can effectively listen to this album. Still, it’s hard not to enjoy and respect the ambition Kate Bush shows on this album.
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Treble Zine
far less immediate, a kind of loose concept album of lengthy ballads that unfold slowly and venture into subtly haunting spaces via artful, atmospheric arrangements. And as with all of Bush’s best material, it’s charmingly weird.
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Express
A NEW Kate Bush album is always an event and this, her first original material since Ariel in 2005, is cause for real celebration.
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Collapse Board
There is snow, and there are words. This lengthy, seven-track record, successor to this year’s deck-clearing Director’s Cut, is an album that loves language every bit as much as it loves snow; you can feel delight soaking through the syllables.
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The Scotsman
TWENTY-ONE years ago Kate assured us that December would be magic again, and with her tenth album she delivers on that promise.
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METRO
Kate Bush’s 50 Words For Snow, although brief, unveils new material that is adventurous and multi-layered.
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Irish Times
50 Words for Snowis a sublime achievement, as uncompromisingly original as anything Bush has ever done.
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Background Magazine
Undoubtedly many people still prefer Kate Bush's earlier works. However, on 50 Words For Snow she proves that nowadays she's just as vital and inventive as in the past. Therefore I would highly recommend this album to everyone who enjoyed her music throughout her career.
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Uncut
Kate Bush has never made a record that seems so ethereally disdainful of convention, of the parameters, themes and expectations of a simple pop song. But at the same time, she has never seemed so normal: a little indulgent to celebrity; acutely aware of how time has brought mortal vulnerability to her voice.
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No Ripcord
It’s the work of a mature and serious artist, who has made a unique and lasting contribution to pop, and this album will continue her reputation.
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Off The Tracks
Bush knows how to conjure a musical (and spiritual) world. There is no other album like this – and to subvert how blatantly uncool it might all be there’s a near-10 minute duet with Elton John.
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SLUG Magazine
Repeated listens reveal [50 Words] to be like a charming miniature world captured inside a perpetually shaken snow globe.
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Super Deluxe Edition
In the end this is an enjoyable, often excellent record, that for many artists might be considered a career high.
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stuff
Kate Bush's latest album is remarkable. On paper it's a nightmare: seven long songs (most between eight and 13 minutes long) . . . Fortunately you don't listen to albums on paper.
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Madison
Largely minimizing the lush orchestrations she's known for, Bush has delivered a spare, gorgeous album that's intended to be pop music for the snowbound. The opening "Snowflake" is built around a haunting piano line and muted drums, as Bush takes on the persona of the titular precipitation.
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boom
It's an album that is truly hard work to listen to, and to a certain extent, to take all that seriously. You would be hard pushed to think of a suitable time or reason to put it on other than if you struggle with sleep; It will either help you drift effortlessly away on a cloud of ZZZzzz's, or simply just bore you into slumber.
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Under the Radar Magazine
With Bush certainly having nothing to prove in terms of creating challenging music, considering albums such as 1982's densely intriguing The Dreaming, the approach for her latest album is comparatively simple, direct, and as much of an enveloping experience as anything in her catalogue.
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Mr. Kinski's Music Shack
50 Words For Snow is an entirely different beast – 7 brand new songs clocking in at just over an hour, and unlike The Directors Cut, an album that demands repeated listening. It’s also unlike any other Kate Bush album.
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The Manc Review
“50 Words for Snow” is a classic album, which nurtures the perpetual willo-the wisp spirit of Kate. Although it takes a few listens to completely appreciate the album, it thinks outside the box, containing a haunting beauty which sends chills down the spine. Its picturesque music, whose orchestral and stripped down acoustics, glide effortlessly across an intense, emotional backdrop. Like snow, on a hillside, “50 Words For Snow”, melts subtly revealing a lush core at its own organic pace.
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The F Word
If . . . you are prepared to do the hard work and sit with the challenge 50 Words for Snow presents, you will be immensely rewarded. And the impact of listening to the album is immediate because of the lengthy journeys the songs take you on. The album demands your attention and, as ever with Bush, the devil is in the detail.
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The Vinyl Anachronist
If you're a fan, this is a must-have; if you're not, you might still be surprised at the nerve it took to make this uncommon and sometimes difficult LP in an age where musical genius and a love for the obscure can be perceived as a character flaw.
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The Line of Best Fit
While the rest of the album fails to rise to the complexities of ‘Lake Tahoe’, 50 Words For Snow is another stepping stone away from the interpretive-dancing-in-a-field Kate Bush of yore. It proves her credentials of distinct maturity as well as exhibiting her ability to experiment successfully with deep-set and sombre but thoroughly captivating music.
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The Manitoban
Bush has put in a lot of work with this disc — arranging, writing and producing the album herself. She has guest singers on most tracks, including Elton John and spoken word by Stephen Fry. The efforts pay off, revealing a playful and meditative exploration of snow.
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USM Free Press
Kate Bush captures the spirit of winter in a dioramic snow globe with her newest album 50 Words for Snow. Earlier works, like her 1978 debut single “Wuthering Heights” and 1985’s Hounds of Love, earned her a reputation for eccentric storytelling, avant-garde musical arrangements and theatrically eclectic choreography.
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Rolling Stone
If you approach this demanding album piece by piece, you are almost always convinced. Only a duet with Elton John gets a bit pretentious. Kate Bush is well advised to abandon the pop music conventions as far as possible - and with "50 Words" creates a simultaneously alien and deeply familiar winter wonderland.
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TONE Audio Magazine
As Kate Bush’s recording output has gotten more and more sparse—50 Words for Snow is only her second album of new material since 1993—so, too, have her arrangements gradually calmed. An artisan of the piano, Bush was always more chamber than concert hall. But 50 Words for Snow begs the listener closer, its hushed quality a cleverly crafted comfort to disguise the turmoil underneath.
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Manchester Salon
The closing track on the album is Among Angels and this gives us Kate Bush as a brilliant singer.
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Live4Ever Media
Listening and re-listening to ‘50 Words For Snow’ only strengthens the idea that this is as much an album as it is a collection of short stories; full of compelling characters, strange and strong and lost in their whiteout world. With every listen, this album will reveal another layer, another part of the story you’d never heard before.
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mxdwn Music
50 Words for Snow could easily soundtrack an evening, fading quietly into the background, but to use it like that would be to miss the point. It demands closer — physically closer — listening. Listen with headphones to be immersed in the pristine, cold world Kate Bush has conjured.
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Sweat Records Miami
50 Words For Snow, combines remarkable lyrical imagery with sweeping, operatic crescendos and Kate’s signature eccentricity. In other words, it is classic Kate Bush and for those who have never listened to the quirky songstress, this is a perfect way to begin a love affair.
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Hi-Fi Plus
50 Words for Snow is quite simply the work of a major artist who remains at the height of her powers. Lyrics evoking myths or dreams still abound, with strange occurrences happening in snowy, far-off places, but the sonics are mostly more down-to-earth and intimate than on previous records. And on the first half of the record Kate Bush explores musical territory that’s as new as her cast of snowbound characters.
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The West Australian
[50 Words] delivers a transporting exploration of the most wistful season of the soul, and clear progress for an artist who has learnt to choose words carefully.
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It's Rude to Stare
With instrumentation merging classical choruses, sweetly mournful piano and electronics, this album is an eccentric thing of beauty. It’s also superior chill-out music.
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mix grill
It is released on November 21 with a very catchy title but even more engaging content. It prepares us for a magical, sensual, unreal winter.
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The Arts Desk
She is a unique British artist, existing in a creative bubble well outside the mainstream yet never marginal or beyond the reach of popular taste.
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