50 Words for Snow - Kate Bush

While Kate Bush’s ’50 Words for Snow’ is not a Christmas album per se, it certainly is seasonal. Of course, in our commercial-charged world dominated by Justin Biebers and X Factor finalists, this comes as something of a surprise from a songwriter of Bush’s calibre. Thankfully, it is these very idiosyncrasies that have kept her music so interesting across her three-and-a-half-decade career. Her loveable eccentricity comes through on opener Snowflake, something of a companion piece to 1980s ‘December Will Be Magic Again’, featuring the requisite Bush warble and gentle instrumental work from the strings and insistent piano – it is only in the somewhat unnecessary Crosby-esque lyrical nods that sees the track derail; “old St Nicholas up the chimney” indeed.

Recalling previous ‘collaborations’ with Lenny Henry (Red Shoes, 1993) and Rolf Harris (Aerial, 2005), Stephen Fry is invited to take the lead on the title track. Sure enough, his lilting, whispering voice brings life to the fifty synonyms for the white stuff from the dreamy ‘blown from polar fur’ to the frankly daft ‘phlegm de neige’. Elton John, whilst far from being an unexpected guest, certainly makes a surprise entrance on the fine ‘Snowed in at Wheeler Street’ – a song which maps the movements of lost love beautifully without the coy romanticism expected in such arrangements – the pairs’ voices mesh elegantly, producing a genuinely intimate listen. As with previous collections, Bush continues to push the longer pieces, with Misty marking a distinct ‘centre-piece’ for the record. Personally, I feel this would have been better-served later in the track listing as it marks something of a premature crescendo; throwing the listener out of sync with that which it precedes. Having said that, Bush shows her time-tested ability to salvage beauty from absurdity; her voice, now noticeably older, is full of husk and earth. Working with little more than her piano’s sustain pedal, Misty’s amusing plotline – centred around building and falling in love with a snowman – somehow seems less than ridiculous; a feat which few can so surely achieve.

It’s business as usual from the zany, aging starlet and yet the ideas that appear so daft on paper once again emerge as astonishing, engaging music. Essentially we have standard Bush; wild and untamed, extraordinary and unwieldy, not always right, but never ever boring.