Review Summary: One of the all-time best rock albums as much as an artistic statement for throwing it all out there at every risk.
*warning: longread*
Pretentiousness is usually seen as a no-go for pop and rock artists. Why spoil something that is, at its core, uncomplicated entertainment with big themes and questions or wrap it in forms that try to ‘transcend’ the uncomplicated entertainment at the core? In a sense, Kate Bush’s fourth LP,
The Dreaming was a recipe for disaster: a young artist liberating herself from the constraint of the style she became famous with in order to experiment wildly with her sonic and thematic palette, tackling themes such as the unsatisfactory quest for knowledge and god, the Vietnam war and the expulsion of aboriginal Australians from their home territory (on the title song).
It didn’t turn out to be a disaster. In fact, it turned out to be one of the greatest records in pop music history. From the banging of opener ‘Sat In Your Lap’ to the banging of closer ‘Get Out Of My House’, this record is one mad, audacious trip whose extreme use of sound matches its extreme lyrical themes and even does so without trying to deliver a contrived narrative throughout its ten tracks.
As mentioned earlier, the opening track starts off with banging drum percussions, soon joined by electronic samples and a playful piano riff, sometimes accented with trumpet samples. It spirals any listener into its mad orbit from the offset. The state of mind described is also something of an intelligent person’s madness: seeking the truth and seeking knowledge and finding nothing but questions over and over again. “Some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap,” a hysteric chorus yells, “some say that knowledge is something that you never have.”
The feeling of not having a grip on your potential is uncannily reflected in the music, with its rhythmic accents sometimes interrupting the flow completely, until in the end the chorus monotonously chants that, in order to get what you want, you need to journey “across the desert, across the weather, across the elements, across the water.” The track is the ultimate opener for the album, which is not an easy ride, but it never feels as if the singer is having an easy ride, either - - the way the tracks at hand are painstakingly crafted invite (demand) an active, painstaking listen.
In the spirit of ‘Sat In Your Lap’,
The Dreaming offers questions, uncertainties and broken oppositions between good and evil in short story form. The second track, ‘There Goes a Tenner’ throws us into the action of a robbery whose perpetrators are hardly at ease. The sinister ska backing is accented unevenly and features synthesizers, a dreamy voice on the chorus, cooing. The power of the storytelling on
The Dreaming is that situations are not explained, start in the middle and only become clear gradually, if at all. In the last verse the narrator remembers a scene following a past robbery, concluding “that’s when we used to vote for him.” Who ‘him’ is exactly is not stated, but it draws someone you vote for, probably a politician, sinisterly into the plot of the robbery.
The Vietnam war – told from the perspective of a Vietnamese guerrilla who ‘lives on his [her?] belly’ trying to kill Americans is told in the third song, 'Pull out the Pin'. It raises compassion for the plight of these forces, who love life and their land and feel invaded by the Americans, who see no reason for being there but higher commands. The drums are tinged with exoticism, but never cloyingly so. They conjure up the steamy rainforest weather surrounding the narrative, sometimes disrupted by train and helicopter sounds – the reality of a crazy war. The perspective accentuates that the fighting is not an actual choice – it is a necessity, because the protagonist ‘loves life’ and wants to maintain his identity.
The guitar riff is not live-played and recorded, like many sound on this record, but programmed and played on the sampler Fairlight CMI, which gives the sound an angular quality, especially clear when it engages in increasingly atonal riffs, weaving into itself, then unravelling.
What difference is ‘Suspended in Gaffa’, which on the surface almost seems like a jolly waltz with a chorus of hysteric soprano Kate Bushes, with strummed guitars, percussion performed on sticks and a machine-like piano backing. The lyrics, though, are difficult to penetrate and hide a craving, even a sadness beneath their upbeat surface. “I caught the glimpse of a god,” a voice in the pre-chorus whispers “all shining and bright”. The chorus then makes clear that this vision of a god or a bigger meaning is a fleeting moment which is impossible to reproduce, thus rendering the search futile, or eternal. It echoes existentialism, and the humour and surrealism that lie in its lyrics seem dreamt up by Dal*, or Camus. The narrator seeks to come to terms with the endlessness of the quest, but still ends the song with “can I have it all now?”
The album definitively slips into darker territory with original A-side closer ‘Leave it Open’, as hard a rock song as ever conceived by a female solo artist. The drums start of rather straightforwardly, as a piano riff with attitude kicks in and Bush’s processed, weirdly filtered voice kicks in with an unimaginably dark lyric about the tension between closing down and being safe and opening up, thereby also letting all the bad things in. The song decides on the latter, sometimes interrupted by a melody which almost sounds like a snippet from an earlier, unreleased Bush song, yelping “but now I’ve started learning how”, soon answered by the filtered voice. “Harm is in us/harm in us but power to arm” is as much as we get for a chorus, before the song really breaks loose with a thunderstorm of distorted guitars and reverse-looped, processed vocals chanting “we let the weirdness in.” She does.
‘The Dreaming’ arrives, again with banging, this time from smashed marble blocks played through the Fairlight, layered didgeridoos and an atmosphere of electronic magic in the air. The lyrics, delivered in a wildly exaggerated Australian accent, describe the intentions of the English-speaking Australians to rid the Aborigine of their home. The accent seems chosen on sound: all the nasals are especially overdone, thus blending in with the continuous didgeridoo drone. The backing vocals and chorus vocals present a sort of pagan magic: “the light ram[ming] through the gaps in the land” and “dreamtime” (delivered as “dre-e-e-e-e-a-a-a-a-a-m-m-m-m-m-t-t-t-t-t-t-i-i-i-i-i-me-me-me-me-me”) with sheep noises, an angry mob and orchestra hits almost viscerally avenging the Aborigine.
The didgeridoo is pitch-shifted and juxtaposed with a similarly nasal Irish wind: the Uillean pipes playing a sort of a jig leading into ‘Night of the Swallow’. Its subdued verses present a woman who tries to prevent her husband from doing something risky and illegal, even threatening to turn him in to the law. In the refrain and chorus he responds by trying to soothe her, and we get but a glimpse from what he is going to do: take some people over the water with a hired plane, doing it swiftly. It’s never clarified what he is going to perpetrate but it is implied that it is something noble: “ooh, let me fly, give me something to show for my miserable life, something to take, would you break even my wings like a swallow?” It presents both partners equally as important and equally as justifiable. Does the woman try to hold him back for his own sake or for
her sake? The chorus is an ecstatic blend of Uillean pipes and screeched voices, a truly transporting and stunningly melodic mechanism in this song.
A more conventional song, the jazz-tinged ballad ‘All the Love’ boasts soundscaping around its midnight-jazz piano riff. Here, for the first time, it actually strikes me how different Bush’s use of the piano as an instrument has become here. Not the trickling motives and chord backings anymore, but as dark shades on an already dark palette. Hardly ever does she use the upper register, instead opting for a truly rock-piano sound: angular, dark and not in the foreground of the mix anymore. On this track, she provides a narrative that almost seems autobiographical for Bush: trying to let people in and open up to them, but find them rebuked by the weird things you are up to. The song documents the struggle between giving and taking in friendships. The chorus vocal, provided by a boy chorister, is particularly eerie and all in all, the track may be most reminiscent of German singer Nico, with the eerie soundscapes. It would fit in neatly in a David Lynch film.
The truly magical, but also bafflingly brutal ‘Houdini’ describes the illusionist’s death and afterlife through the voice of his wife and long-time assistant in his tricks, Bess Houdini. Bush has done her research: into Bess’s attempts to contact Houdini after his death using code, flashbacking to his last magic act in which he almost drowned and was then left in a coma for the remainder of his life. The track is loaded with hidden messages among its tickling piano and clock sounds, with the more emotional parts of the lyrics being absolutely roared out by Bush, who apparently ate chocolate, smoked a bunch of cigarettes and drank a lot of milk before doing a take.
The last track, which is the most uncompromising, morose song ever written by Bush, is ‘Get Out of My House’, apparently based on Stephen King’s novel
The Shining but instead creating a female counterpart to it. It describes someone trying to either shut out the evils that haunt her or shut out reality. It feels as a continuation in sound and subject matter to ‘Leave it Open’. The unevenly accentuated percussion and shouted chorus hook are bone-chilling amid the soundscapes and guitars. The interludes where she starts reciting “I’m the concierge chez-moi, honey” are a bit goofy, but they underline the sadness of the tale at hand. In the end, ‘Get Out of My House’ morphs into one of the most frightening dialogues ever heard in rock music, between a deep, scary voice demanding to be let in and “bring in the memories”. The narrator turns into a bird to escape, the antagonist into the wind to blow away the bird. Eventually, the shape shifting stops by both of them turning into mules, hee-hawing to the moon in darkness and sadness. This is the last sound heard on the album.
The Dreaming, in the four years that I’ve known it now, continues to yield unthinkable surprises, pleasures and new discoveries every single time I hear it. It invites regularly listening on full volume while reading along in the lyrics booklet, allowing yourself to be fully absorbed by the music and reflecting on the themes at hand. Such records as
The Dreaming, or Björk’s
Biophilia or Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy are worth their pretentiousness, because they lead to great music, deep reflections on themes or lasting influence on the sonic palette of music. Every time an artist makes a record I might want to dismiss as overly pretentious, I conclude that the risk of being overly pretentious has put forward the truly maverick, forward-looking albums, and if no one (like, for instance, Beethoven, Ravel or Berio) ever had taken that risk, music nowadays would look quite different.
