Hounds of Love (2018

Product Information

Added the numerical report as a rar for interest. The 1985 CD as you can see has more peaks and troughs, than the compressed 1985 remastering, on CD anyway. I don't have the 24 bit 1985 remaster to compare, but may re-consider, would it restore the LRA I wonder? Looks like Audacity and Musicscope have a different interpretation of the same piece? As fans scooped up copies of Hounds of Love (the first Bush album released on vinyl, cassette, and CD simultaneously), the music press lavished the album with praise. Following Gabriel’s lead, Bush banned the use of cymbals and hi-hats on Never for Ever. “I always felt there was this slightly sort of MOR quality to hi-hats,” she explained. “It just sounded a bit passé. So that was one of the key things, make sure there’s no hi-hats.” Instead, Bush sampled aerosol can sprays with the Fairlight to deploy in the sonic space usually occupied by hi-hats. Unfortunately, the 1997 is a victim of the “ Loudness War.” Whether measured by crest factor DR score or R128 dynamic range, Blair’s 1997 CD is markedly less dynamic than the 1985 Cooper CDs. A comparison of “Running Up that Hill” waveforms in Audacity bears out this fact:

Rhythm took center stage on Hounds of Love. “When I was initially coming up with the songs…I would actually get Del to manifest in the rhythm box the pattern that I wanted,” Bush explained at a 1985 fan club convention. “As a bass player I think he has a very natural understanding of rhythms and working with drums, and he could also get the patterns that I could hear in my head and that I wanted. It’s…through him that we started off with the rhythmic basis that was then built upon.” Waking the Witch' is bloody amazing, I love the beginning dialogues, and the last minute and a half! This song is the core song of what her tour is based on! Seriously, though, great analysis, and I'm really curious to audition it against my Japan mini-LP version (which uses the original '85 mastering). It’s not clear why different pressings have such different peak values, but they’re all undoubtedly the same mastering, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given that Cooper is the only one credited on any of the 1985 CDs 3.Like “Running Up that Hill,” the second and third singles from Hounds of Love would also be drawn from the album’s first side. If I were allowed to swear, I’d say that Hounds of Love is f***ing brilliant, but me mum won’t let me.... All human life contained herein. Dramatic, moving and wildly, unashamedly, beautifully romantic.

But by the time she released Hound of Love seven years later, at the ripe old age of 26, Bush was portrayed by the press as a washed-up relic.I am a Lady Gaga fan, and our music tastes are very varied compare to some fanbases! I see Kate Bush in Lady Gaga a lot (not the other way round, obviously)...the theatrics, how certain songs are sung! Similar women, except one excels, and I'm not afraid to admit that as a Lady Gaga fan!! God)" has become her first Top Forty single in the U.S. (in the U.K., Kate rules as Madonna does here), but it's not more melodic than some of the other songs ("And Dream of Sheep" could be a huge, if bizarre, hit for Barry Manilow), just less complex. Making full use of her four-octave soprano and brother Paddy's ethnomusicological abilities (he plays dijeridu, balalaika and fujare on the LP), the Mistress of Mysticism has woven another album that both dazzles and bores. For the objective bit: used Musicscope to analyse, here is a comparison of the 1985 Japan disc of Hounds with the CD box set of Hounds, 2018 remaster. Another great article Josh and one of my longest favourite pop artists ever in Kate Bush, and her best album. In 1986, I bought Hounds as well as The Dreaming on the same day, "See the light, ram through the gaps in the land" very accurate Australian landscape in the early mornings through trees... anyway. Both CDs are made in Japan but featured only English booklets and covers. I now listen to the likes of Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie (Lady Gaga inspired this choice mostly), and so on, due to this album!

Sonically, it’s easy to give the 2018 remaster the TBVO crown. However, the aforementioned presence of the single mix of “The Big Sky,” rather than the original album mix, might be a deal breaker for some fans. The differences are subtle, but I prefer the single mix. However, placing it on the remaster is clearly an act of historical revisionism. Ultimately, the sonic edge of the 2018 remaster makes it worth seeking out even for those who prefer the album mix of “The Big Sky.” Just hold on to your original CD for the original mix. I'm not saying this negatively, I'm so incredibly happy she's getting the recognition she deserves but I fear most of it is a fad and way more about stranger things than kate bush. I really hope im wrong. Either way I'm happy cuz that means they'll make more releases of her stuff. And my vast collection is now worth double the price lol. Too bad this coulda happened a year ago so she could have gotten in the hall of fame. It's just a bit cringe that now people think everyone who likes her likes her because of stranger things(now I know what the hipsters feel like liking people before they were popular) but if even 1/10 of these people become actual fans I'm happy. She's getting the recognition she's deserved all these years. On her next outing, Never for Ever, Bush took over the production reigns with the help of engineer Jon Kelly. It was a major step in Bush’s assertion artistic independence. “Obviously the production is such a big part of what the song is,” she told Claude Van Heye in 2005. “It’s every bit as much what the song is as the lyric and...I mean, it is the song.” Unlike the 1997 remaster, there’s no problem with compression on the new Guthrie/Bush remaster. On some songs, the 1985 CDs have slightly higher R128 numbers, while on others the 2018 remaster’s numbers are higher. Overall the 1985 CDs score either a 12 or a 13 DR, while the 2018 remaster is a 12 DR. In other words, Guthrie and Bush did an excellent job preserving the album’s original dynamic range.Despite its sonic limitations and clunky interface, Bush used the Fairlight to transform her already highly idiosyncratic take on piano-based singer-songwriting into something wholly unique and largely indescribable. “Discovering the Fairlight gave me a whole new writing tool, as well as an arranging tool…,” Bush explained in 1990, “With a Fairlight you’ve got everything, a tremendous range of things. It completely opened me up to sounds and textures, and I could experiment with these in a way I could never have done without it.”

This by far beats out any Madonna or Lady Gaga album (I'm a fan of Madonna's music, not her, but I am a 17-year-old dedicated Little Monster of Queen Gaga!) Or just about any female album! With traces of classical, operatic, tribal and twisted pop styles, Kate creates music that observes no boundaries of musical structure or inner expression…. With no plans to tour America, Kate is likely to remain obscure on this side of the Atlantic. While her eclecticism is welcomed and rewarded in her homeland her genius goes ignored here — a situation that is truly a shame for an artist so adventurous and naturally theatrical. Describing the album as “a timeless classic from a truly unique artist”, Hounds of Lovejoins their 1921 Centenary Edition series with a new and exclusive reissue pressed on recycled vinyl and limited to 1500 copies. We note that this is not a coloured vinyl, as with some other editions in this series. Kate’s album is No.4 0f 37 albums in this set of vinyl reissues.Upon close listening, it’s apparent that the 2018 remaster has a greater degree of depth and clarity than the 1985 CDs. 5 The sound stage on the Guthrie/Bush remaster is deeper, and the remaster evinces greater micro detail than the 1985 mastering, despite not being EQ’d to be brighter. Likely, this greater resolution is the result of a better transfer using more recent analog-to-digital conversion technology. While fans have spotted a few minor errors elsewhere in the 2018 remasters, the Hounds of Love remaster done by Bush and Guthrie is spotless. I took a look at the waveforms while writing this TBVO, and you can definitely see a few momentary high peaks are slightly shorter on the 2018 "Running," but it seemed insignificant to me after repeated listening. (The DR scores on the song are only one point apart, FWIW.) In the years since, The Dreaming has received a critical reevaluation and come to be regarded as a underrated classic. At the time, however, it was seen as a dagger through Bush’s commercial viability. As Thompson summarized in his excellent biography: “[ The Dreaming] had cost her a fortune, way beyond the advance she received, took her a year of almost solid recording, hopping around studios and between engineers, and it had pushed her to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. The company hated it and it killed her as a singles artists for four years.” In her early use of the Fairlight, Bush prefigured production techniques that would become more and more common as the use of computers in music advanced. “She responded instinctively to all the sonic and cultural implications of the Fairlight,” John Walters, who helped Bush program the Fairlight, told biographer Graeme Thompson. “She was naturally ahead of her time and, of course, went on to do much more with it as the instrument developed. She made the most of it for her own idiosyncratic music.” Disjunctive, idiosyncratic and so very, very inventive, Kate Bush's 1985 magnum opus, "Hounds of Love", was the intentionally streamlined yet defiant response to complaints regarding her efficiency in the studio and detractors of the lyrical and structural esotericism inherent in her work. Greatly emboldened by the advances of the digital age, the ever-experimental Bush went one further, building a home studio and developing her latest new material to her satisfaction, subsequently dividing the end product into two distinctive sections. Even under contemporaneous scrutiny, both parts, replete with layered electronic instrumentation, sound effects, and expressive yet refined vocal acrobatics, successfully cohere, and, if persevered with, the full measure still holds up and works incredibly well despite its ambitious structure.