Box set! I did the whole thing in order, but listened to each record several times before moving on to avoid overdosing.

THE KICK INSIDE: Better cover art than the US version I saw. By which I mean, there’s cover art, not just a photo of Kate.

Do cliched people know they’re cliched? I’ve been wondering this because occasionally I’ll run across an apparent primary source for an artistic trope I figured was just inherently boring or lazy. Joni Mitchell, for example, may not have been the first confessional folk songwriter (I have no idea, just guessing not) but Blue doesn’t sound like someone working within a form; it just sounds distinctive enough that I can see how people’s ideas about music accumulated around it. And I only just heard it recently. So I wonder, how is it that so many of the musicians who followed Joni Mitchell managed to sound unoriginal to me even at a time when I thought they were merely colorless, not unoriginal?

With Kate Bush it’s a little more interesting, because the archetype she embodies (or which she created?) is only incidentally musical; she’s the dotty, airy British woman-child. (I realize she was, in fact, 17 when this record was made.) She presumably didn’t have to fake her accent, unlike countless television characters and (I assume) the members of Rasputina, but I’d have thought I’d find this annoying anyway. Instead… I guess the trick is to do something without coming off as the sort of person who *always* does that thing. Much easier in everyday life than for a musician.

I can’t tell if the production is dated as such, or if it just sounds like an old (decaying) recording. Tinkliness suits Bush, maybe even undercutting some of her more doe-eyed tendencies for her own good.

I’m glad I got the box set. Even if this and Hounds Of Love are her two best records (which I’ve heard they might be) I’m interested enough to want the other four albums. And she seems just quirky enough that b-sides might be farther out/more interesting (as with the Pet Shop Boys, for example) instead of just lower quality than the album tracks.

I listen to so little non-punk-derived 70s music that I don’t trust my instincts, which are telling me this sounds like the Sparks.

LIONHEART: Disappointing. I was humming songs from The Kick Inside to myself after only two or three listens (sometimes without realizing what they were), while very little of this sticks. Actually, worse: I don’t like “Oh England My Lionheart” but THAT has stayed with me.

My initial impression was that it got better as it went on. Wondering if this had more to do with acclimation than real quality, I decided to immediately spin it again. Same impression… “Hammer Horror” comes together.

With a few more listens I warmed to “Symphony In Blue” too; I’m game for anyone who sings about sex as though they have a point to make (whether or not they do) instead of applying sex as a mood or a filter.

As a society we don’t seem positive what we mean by, say, “thinking about sex”. Everyone’s heard that the average person thinks about sex every N seconds, but if I’m trying to decide what kind of sandwich to buy for lunch, am I thinking about economics?

NEVER FOR EVER: Seems more like The Kick Inside that Lionheart did, even if in the end it’s disappointing. After several plays the only songs that have stuck in my head were the first and last (”Babooshka” and “Breathing”, both very likable) and the exactly-middle track, “The Wedding List”. The latter is just as insipid and selfish as every other murder-suicide fantasy I’ve heard in a song.

THE DREAMING: My friend Cee says, “She sounds like a ladybug would, if it could sing.” This is actually living up to its reputation as her weirdest record, but the weirdness is merely radical rather than bizarre: it seems like the work of a songwriter who has *access* to a palette full of peculiar sounds just doing whatever works best, not someone self-consciously pushing boundaries. Of course, art isn’t magic; presumably Bush had to push her own limits to make this record and probably the three before it as well.

I felt shallow at first for liking how different the tracks are from each other sonically, since I suppose if I had infinite attention it wouldn’t matter. Not sure any work of art has ever been praised for its lack of variety, though. I’ll calm down.

HOUNDS OF LOVE: I’d already listened to this several times when I got the box (in fact, it was the reason). The Dreaming is *only* disappointing in light of how melodic some of these songs are; without hearing Hounds Of Love one could easily think that a mild unhummability was the price you paid for sounding as interesting as The Dreaming did.

I was surprised to realize that two of the songs which stayed in my head best were the first and last in “The Ninth Wave”. Setting that aside, though, I really dislike dividing the record up into a ’song’ side and a ‘weird’ side. You’d think that putting the big hit single first ensured as much as was necessary that people wouldn’t write HoL off as bizarre.

The little Kate Bush I’d heard before last month occurred during high school, when MTV played one song from The Sensual World at night a lot. I hated it then for being too mushy; the funny thing is that now, my only real bone to pick with Bush involves her morbidness and seeming belief that suffering makes good artistic material. If only I’d realized back THEN, I would have gobbled it up. Funny!

THE SENSUAL WORLD: This chronological box-set approach has finally paid off… I’m not finding that much to like about this album (though the previously despised song “Love And Anger” is quite good; maybe the rest need to sink in) but I can hear constant reminders of earlier Kate.

Though I’d forgotten it, the half-”ooo”, half-”mmm” vocalizing in the middle particularly bothered me when I was 14.

THE RED SHOES: Not part of the box set, but I found a secondhand copy right around the time I was finishing with TSW and about to crack open the rarities CDs, so why not? Her earlier unpredictability seems more like directionlessness now. “Rubberband Girl” is sort of craven (also, in my mind it keeps blending into “Express Yourself”) and “Eat The Music” glittering; either one is a plausible place for Kate Bush to have ended up in in 1993 but hearing them both reminds me too much of the days when I thought it was natural law that, upon buying a tape, you’d learn that most of the songs you hadn’t heard already were both bad and unlike the singles.

Also quite inconclusive. If I were famous and thinking about retiring, I’d want my farewell to be small and perfect.

THIS WOMAN’S WORK I & II: The b-sides recapitulate ontogeny nicely, but I found that far too many of them resisted concerted attention. I hate to feel like I’ve neglected records, so when I feel like I need more Kate Bush in my life (it could be a few months… not that I haven’t enjoyed this) I will probably start with these.

I didn’t specifically buy the box set on the recommendation of the kind of people who mention on Amazon that they had already tracked down all but one of the b-sides but hey, one new song by Kate was worth the $200 this thing cost when it first came out. Those people are clearly deranged. Yet I was expecting the appeal of the rarities to be in proportion to that of the other albums.

Also, and finally, “Experiment IV” doesn’t sound experimental at all.

Good night, Kate.

I liked Gryner’s album of covers so much that I went back to acquire several of her older CDs, which for the most part left me indifferent. Glad this new one is good, even if I can’t imagine what possessed her to use visibly pixellated images for the cover art. I’ve been seeing a lot of that lately — not pictures blocky enough for it to be a conscious design choice, I don’t think, just stuff that looks like it was compressed.

Letting people play the whole album over the web for free until it’s released certainly makes Aimee Mann a Good Egg in my book. Unfortunately, I feel like she’s earned more patience from me (by releasing increasingly slow-growing, eventually-satisfying records) than I in fact have to offer on the basis of one medium-tedious listen.

Though of course, being in a rut and being in a groove are the same except for which direction you’re facing.

All things considered, I guess having three songwriters is an excellent way to make sure your band doesn’t get too repetitive. Same principle as the radio.

Better than most tribute albums, certainly, but after a while it’s all the same. And an original song “inspired by the music of the Cure”?

Even though you can’t look at the front cover without being reminded twice which continent the band lives on, this record features more than a little of the posed, declamatory vocal style characteristic to American rap-rock. They can’t have meant to… can they?

Otherwise, if I’m drawing my genre lines correctly, this is decent Italian house with minor variations. When “Blue” came on, my Scottish coworker said, “It’s the ‘I will die in Aberdeen’ song, eh?”

I’m not a Go-Betweens completist. “Completist”! Sounds like something one doesn’t want to be. However, I may start claiming to be one, since completist fandom is less embarrassing, in general, than admitting that I hated the packaging of the previous GBs reissues so much I was tempted to replace those albums I already own, bonus disc or no… (The last set had coordinated covers and spines, which appeals to me except that they all looked like tacky wedding invitations.)

Attempting to be prudent, though, I got only one: an album I didn’t already have. I’ll be damned if the 10 bonus tracks aren’t better than the real thing! (This despite what the liner notes make out to be dodgy origins in some cases; “never-before released” can be good news or bad.) The proper Spring Hill Fair drags a little, if you ask me. I suspect it won’t be long before I re-acquire the first two albums for their rarities discs, and if the remaining catalog (Liberty Belle, Tallulah, Lovers Lane) gets the same two-disc treatment, who knows?

Sometimes in retrospect, bands accused of being phonies in the middle of tsunami-force musical trends turn out to have been simply miscategorized while doing something slightly different. Not Godstar. Authentic or not, it still sounds like they really, really wanted to be a second-string indie-MOR band. The vividness of this desire is such that even when they’re good you still want to grumble at them about trying harder next time.

I didn’t buy this. Didn’t need to! Despite the tempting title, it turns out the New Order disc is just the late, spiritless “BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert” show, already widely available on CD. (I didn’t check, but I suspect the Joy Division side was included in the JD box set.) So, ‘before and after’ what? 1987? Ha ha, I jest. Obviously the event in question is the death of Ian Curtis, who’s pictured on the front of the jewel case. Fuck Fuel 2000.

Like all the best parts of Bis’s career rolled into one.