This is not, strictly speaking, a new Kate Bush album. Just a warning for all of you who'd gotten used to agonizingly long waits between Bush records. It was easy to hope, when Director's Cut was first announced, that we'd been blessed ahead of schedule with the latest transmission from her private art-rock fairy land. Instead, this is a rethink of a somewhat controversial period in her career, by an artist who claims not to give much thought to her albums once they've been sent to market.
Director's Cut transforms songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. Sometimes crucial elements (rhythm tracks, vocals) are re-recorded. Some aspects (like certain guest performances) are left unchanged. Occasionally an entire song gets a note-by-note remake. It's a major and unexpected reinvention of familiar and very time-bound material, not quite "new" and also not quite what fans have been playing for years now. The very different mix of Director's Cut changes not just the sound but the emotional kick inside many of these songs. What was once the work of a shy woman who came to roaring life on record is now just as often subdued, reflective, inward-looking. It's worthy of standing as its own entry in Bush's discography, without necessarily replacing the albums it draws from.
At the time of its release, The Sensual World seemed both up to date and not of its time. The glossy studio-obsessive production sounded definitely of its moment, fitting for the era of booming drums and reverb-soaked pop trifles from bands like Fine Young Cannibals and INXS. But the songs, and Bush's performances, were stark reminders that she actually came out of the same tradition that gave us the operatic vocals of prog rock, the jazz-tinged complexity of the Canterbury psychedelic scene, the unashamed theatricality that led to Peter Gabriel dressing up like a giant daffodil. It made for a strange hybrid, the smoothness of the Big 80s meets the complexity and expressionism of the prog 70s. Much of the record's tension came from wrapping shiny pop accessibility around songs that might burst into emotionally raw strangeness at any time. Bush played to the moment, but couldn't be contained by it.
By the time of The Red Shoes-- with its prog structures, guest-star guitar heroics, world music touches, all given another dose of pop polish-- Bush's music was too ornate to fit in with the stripped-down "realness" of alt-rock. It was also still too defiantly individual to sit alongside the work of her 70s and 80s peers, many of whom had moved into comfortable, profitable, and bland MOR singer-songwriter territory. Her moment hadn't so much passed-- though it'd be hard to point out anyone else making music that sounded like this at the time-- as she'd become a genre-of-one. The fussed-over textures and genteel folk touches of adult contemporary peeled back mid-song to reveal naked eroticism, rage, joy, Bush's voice spluttering out wordless weirdness or leaping into ecstatic ululations.
What Bush has done on Director's Cut, put simply, is to strip the 80s from these songs. (That goes for the Red Shoes material, too, even though the album was released in the 90s.) The gigantic drums and digital polish, what both dated the music instantly and gave it that stark contrast between accessibility and the deeply personal, have been replaced with less showy rhythm tracks, and a warmer, more intimate atmosphere. On the original "The Sensual World", the elements drawn from Celtic folk felt like striking intrusions in an all-digital world. Renamed "Flower of the Mountain" here, those rustic elements no longer feel quite so out of place, whether you found the original an intriguing hybrid or an awkward merger of old and new. The songs still don't have the feel of a band playing together, but they have a new unity, even the synthetic elements part of a lovingly handcrafted sound. "The Red Shoes", another Celtic-inflected standout, with one of Bush's wildest performances, gains a new intensity precisely because the instruments no longer feel so sterile. But not every element of this patchwork has been pieced together perfectly. The eerie keyboard textures on "And So Love Is", the kind of sour 80s kitsch beloved by Gang Gang Dance, seem surprisingly natural in this new environment. But Eric Clapton's bluesy wanking sounds even more out of place now, stadium pop bluster in a homemade world. It produces tension for sure, but the wrong sort.
It's the singing that just as often startles, though. Bush is less show-offy on Director's Cut than any of her pre-hiatus albums. For a woman known for her range, and her fearlessness at using that range, her performances are always tempered and often low-key here. As with so many songs on Director's Cut, "This Woman's Work" becomes almost shocking in its difference, not least because it's transformed from one of Bush's biggest showstoppers into something far more mournful, the singer restraining herself as if almost but not quite broken by love. The backing track is just as minimal, but deeper, the instrumental textures less brittle. A hushed, lonely Bush sounds as if she's drifting through a vast, lonely space. But instead of the original's childlike verses surging to grown-ass-woman longing on the choruses, Bush is more evenly paced here, communicating deep regret more through a bereft tone than diva theatrics. It's desolate and intimate, like much of Director's Cut, where the original's bravura made it feel both tender and defiant, like much of Bush's early work.
Even with an older and more reserved Bush occasionally putting the brakes on that melodrama, these reworked songs don't totally relinquish that unashamed grandiosity that makes Bush such a love-hate proposition. Director's Cut provides a unique opportunity to do an A/B comparison between a late-career artist and her younger self. But which you'll prefer likely depends on whether you favor a more assured artist working within her strengths, or a brash younger artist delighting in the defying of pop conventions.
