Review Summary: One of Kate Bush's lesser albums, it fails to hit the mark compared to what came before and what would come after.
High stakes may be fatal for young artists. Kate Bush's 1978 debut
The Kick Inside was a beautiful and intriguing junior record with incredibly sophisticated lyrics and interesting arrangements at times, even though by now it all sounds a bit old-fashioned. She was a star, an innovator from this earliest point, so the stakes were set high for
Lionheart, her second album.
It fails to deliver the goods we hoped for. Only a few songs live up to the high standard set by the predecessor. Those tracks, 'Wow', 'Fullhouse' and 'Hammer Horror' foreshadow what Kate Bush was going to do on her subsequent albums: narrative, thematic tracks with expressive, romantic vocals and interesting arrangements. Of course there are some good tracks next to those, but they fail to take a step further than what Bush had done on
The Kick Inside.
The album starts of with the soft rock song 'Symphony in Blue', which has a nice, but somewhat weepy lyric and a performance that announces the album as an exaggeration of
The Kick Inside rather than an organical continuation of it. The chord progression and the guitars involved are just a bit too soft-rock for my taste.
The next song, the piano-driven ballad 'In Search of Peter Pan', is so much in the vein of the previous album that most people would recognize it as a song that would be on there. It's lyrical though, and sounds alright. It doesn't get too boring and the lyric is well-crafted and emotional ("My eyes are full but my face is empty"). It's really a Kate Bush childhood-song, which she probably had written already before production of her debut.
Then comes 'Wow', an astonishing, catchy track which can be read both as sarcasm and genuine emotion. The subtle orchestral arrangement, the trademark glissandi in the chorus, the unexpected musical twists and the theatrical allegorism add up to the best Kate Bush track from her pre-Never for Ever period. It also has some nice tongue-in-cheeks remarks about actors, homosexuality and the strife of backups to make the headlines.
'Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake' is a game song on which Kate Bush tries to give a game performance. Her academism in songwriting, though, doesn't quite allow this, and although sometimes the controlled presence of her voice seems to loosen up, it fails to lift the song, which varies between a piano-pop verse and a hard rock chorus, out of the feeling that every detail has been thought about thoroughly, it just fails to acquire the atmosphere it needs.
'Oh England, My Lionheart', although not a bad-composed song, is so patriotic that it gives me the creeps lyrically. It's one of the weakest points on the album because it's old-fashioned, very British in the worst sense of the word and tries to use an ancient arrangement which doesn't work to its advantage (later in her career she would employ this device more succesfully).
'Fullhouse''s catchy chromatic runs and the passionate chorus make this, too, an album highlight on 'Lionheart'. A pretty straightforward rock song, Kate uses her soprano to her advantage as she avoids the cooing falsetto, instead opting for a harsher sound. The song, using varied meters and the trickling chromatic run during the verses, is a great opener to side B.
'In the Warm Room' is virtually a toned-down copy of 'Room for the Life' or 'The Man With the Child in his Eyes' and is a bit weepy. It's greyish and just plain boring, that says enough about it.
The final tryptich of songs is better than most of the album. It starts off with the sympathetic song 'Kashka from Baghdad' about a homosexual couple who live a hidden existence. Although this song, too, fails to improve much on the songwriting on
The Kick Inside, it's a fun song that doesn't get boring. Also, it introduces ethnic influences to Bush's instrumentation.
'Coffee Homeground' has a game lyric and a game performance by Bush. It's campy, though, telling about a murder plot with poison in the coffee. The stories from which it's constructed fail to really make sense, but the song is over so quick that that doesn't really matter. It's fun, good campy fun.
Then comes the second theatrical song, the album's closer 'Hammer Horror' which speeds up itself and Kate Bush alike. It uses film score effects and a reggae-like rhythm. The lyric is well-thought about and the songs tense, kinetic feel and Bush's beautiful performance. Also, it uses distorted drum machines on some parts which foreshadows her later use of this device. It finishes with gongs and scary movie music, which is an astounding way to finish of an album. This is one of the few tracks that really helped Bush forward with her songwriting.
Overall, the album has its faults - a lot of them, and it's probably Kate Bush's worst album although it brings some musical highlights. It's not an annoying listen, it just fails to live up to the standard we would expect from the prodigy and sometime-genius Kate Bush is. Bush herself, too, has expressed that she felt this album was rushed through and consequently, she took over more and more of the production of her albums, marking longer gaps in between and leading up to masterpieces 'The Dreaming' and 'Hounds of Love'.
Maybe my disappointment stems from the knowledge that she would go on to do only better and better things and this is the least essential entry in her discography. Maybe, though, it also stems from the fact that there is less congruence between music and lyrics, and that most of the music is only conceived on quite an average level, except for 'Wow', 'Fullhouse' and 'Hammer Horror', two of which are on the compilation
The Whole Story which is a more rewarding summary than this is an album.
