50 Words for Snow

50 Words For Snow is Kate Bush’s first album since ‘Aerial’ 7 years ago. Very much an album in its own vein, long, drawn out tunes that lead the listener into quiet backwaters of sound whilst gently disturbing your thoughts. Pretty much exactly what all Kate Bush fans have been waiting for.

Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow follows Director’s Cut, a dramatically reworked collection of catalog material, by six months. This set is all new, her first such venture since 2005′s Aerial. The are only seven songs here, but the album clocks in at an hour. Despite the length of the songs, and perhaps because of them, it is easily the most spacious, sparsely recorded offering in her catalog. Its most prominent sounds are Bush’s voice, her acoustic piano, and Steve Gadd’s gorgeous drumming — though other instruments appear (as do some minimal classical orchestrations). With songs centered on winter, 50 Words for Snow engages the natural world and myth — both Eastern and Western — and fantasy. It is abstract, without being the least bit difficult to embrace. It commences with “Snowflake,” with lead vocals handled by her son Bertie. Bush’s piano, crystalline and shimmering in the lower middle register, establishes a harmonic pattern to carry the narrative: the journey of a snowflake from the heavens to a single human being’s hand, and in its refrain (sung by Bush), the equal anticipation of the receiver.