Kate Bush Album Poll: The Dreaming (1982)

I wouldn't disagree ... but I would need to listen to the red shoes more, for me to have an opinion on it

 

I'm in this minority too. The songwriting is certainly very different, but doesn't do anything for me. However, I'm not about to vote 'not recommended' as so many Kate Bush fans are advocates of this record that maybe eventually I will come around!

 

A masterpiece. My favourite KB album and one of my favourites of all time. Upon first hearing it when I was 13 years old, I was absolutely gobsmacked and nothing has changed in the ensuing 31 years! I never tire of it and always felt that Kate’s efforts to place Indigenous Australian issues in the title track was woefully overlooked by so many. To a young kid it was bizarre recognition from an international artist... prior to this only Midnight Oil and Warumpi Band had really highlighted some Indigenous issues in popular music. It’s difficult to adequately describe how powerful this was for a young kid growing up in remote Australia.

 

I've said it before in other threads -- this is the only Kate Bush album I still regularly return to and the only one I truly love (though there are others I like very much). A brilliant, original, breakthrough work that changed the way the way music sounds and was made as much as any album from the first couple of years of the decade (what other record is cited by artists as diverse as Bjork and Outkast as an influence).

To me it's an album like Trout Mask Replica or Astral Weeks or The Velvet Underground & Nico -- at once of rock and built from familiar elements, but something that transcends rock and sounds albums like it's in a genre of its own.

I also don't really think the album is as outre as other people seem to feel. The songs are relatively conventional in form with digestible verses-chorus structure, and it's very almost poppily rhythm forward (the most rhythm forward record I think she ever made).

What's different about the album is the arrangements, the way it's made with the samples, the mix of organic traditional sounds and electronic sounds.

I also think it's an album that catches an artist in transition and it's an album about transition, about people caught in the moments in between and just before -- in "Pull Out the Pin" and "Suspended in Gaffa" and "Houdini." It still stuns me and sounds fresh and unique 35 years later. I can't say that about a lot of the music of the era -- that album and My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts, if you look back at those first two or three years of the '80s, cast long shadows. Brilliant.

I'd also add that I kind of think of Hounds of Love as "son of The Dreaming." The pop side has the rhythm forward feel, the Ninth Wave side expands this whole investigation of a liminal state into a side-long suite (doesn't work as well for me because I find it static and not very dramatic and without a character to really become invested in, which is not the way I feel about the circumstances or characters in "Pull Out the Pin" or "Houdini") -- even formally you get a big important jig on side two. It's just that the arrangements and melodies and harmonies are much more stripped down and simplified, there's just not as much going on from bar to bar or song to song in Hounds. To me, it's more of a watered-down version of the breakthroughs of The Dreaming, to others I'm sure it's more of taking the "experiements" of The Dreaming and turning them into something less "experimental" (in quotes because I don't really think these things are experiments, they're finished songs and arrangements).

 

I voted solid effort. A fan of the artist should have her complete works, as they are all recommendable. I'm a big Kate Bush fan, but I think her masterpiece is Hounds of Love. I also prefer Never for Ever, The Sensual World, Aerial and 50 Words for Snow to The Dreaming.

It's a very good album but I have never particularly connected with it in the ways I do my very favorite works. I prefer a more emotional Kate, as we get on her later works. Some of her singing on this album is very gulping and (for me) a bit overdone. I do love 'Pull Out the Pin,' 'Suspended in Gaffa' and 'Houdini.'

 

A masterpiece. This was the album on which she really used the studio as an instrument, and it's my second favourite of her LPs after The Kick Inside. I like it far more than the overrated Hounds Of Love, which has always sounded to me like a commercial distillation of The Dreaming, with the most exciting elements removed. I even love the title track, which certainly divides opinion. Interestingly, a song released the previous year used Australian musical elements in a similar way, though I doubt Kate heard it as it was the B-side to a commercially unsuccessful single.

 

Björk has always had control of the music recorded as well. She’s not bound to what the record label says she’s going to do or not do. She calls the shots.

The Red Shoes is one of her weakest albums. The succession of albums of Never For Ever through The Sensual World are flawless, IMHO.

 

It's probably the most demented, noisy, downright bizarre album I have that can also be credibly considered a "pop" album. Each song is stuffed with so many ideas (musical and lyrical) that you can't possibly absorb all of them on any given listen. I used to listen to this at 3:00 in the morning when I couldn't get back to sleep, and Kate's screaming sounded like a voice from a completely different world. And amidst all of the terrifying sounds and thoughts she throws out, she also offers up two of her most perfect, comforting, reassuring melodies (Suspended In Gaffa and All The Love). It's a record so ridiculous that I'm amazed she could even conceive of it, let alone create it and convince someone to release it.

It's absolutely brilliant.

 

it is the moment when everything before coalesces. every thing about it is perfect.
there wasn't a person i met or struck up a conversation with for months after first hearing it that didn't get battered with "you have to hear this album, it will change your life"
from that moment on i had a softer spot for the thumpers that would come to the door pushing their beliefs. because when you feel it, you have to tell someone.

 

One of several; My second favorite KB album.

 

A solid effort for me.

 

Are you folks referring to Graeme Thomson's Under the Ivy? I'm searching on Amazon, and don't see anything by "Thompson." Thanks.

 

Absolute masterpiece - one of the pop/rock best albums of the last 50 years period.

 

Yes, Under the Ivy, that's the one. Sorry for the misspelling. The book is highly recommended.

 

Oh right, he's written without a 'p'. Yes, that's the one!

 

I voted Masterpiece, although I consider Never For Ever and Hounds of Love to also be (different kinds of) masterpieces.

I love all the comments here, which is how I've thought of The Dreaming at various times and in various moods.

It's one of those albums that I can absolutely love for its sheer originality, stuffed with brilliant ideas.

Or, in the wrong mood, it hurts my brain and I have to turn it off.

But, aren't masterpieces like that?

 

Masterpiece.

And I pontificated on why I feel that way in the Kick Inside Poll thread.

 

Pull of the Bush ! ! !

 

just listening to The kick Inside...what a great album! The Man With The Child in His Eyes...gives me tears...

 

Masterpiece. More than Hounds of Love. More than The Kick Inside. I would argue it's not *completely* accessible ("Sat In Your Lap" has bee polarizing when I've played this album for people and that's what leads it off) -- but it's brilliant.

 

My favorite album by a female artist ever. A masterpiece in every sense of the word.

 

Um, I meant the Hounds of Love poll thread.

 

22-24 years old when she wrote and recorded this. A staggering achievement for any artist let alone someone that age. I still hear new things every time I listen to this record. An absolutely groundbreaking work of genius. And like all groundbreaking works of genius, not everyone got it when it was born, some still don't get it.

 

Inspired by this thread, I listened to side one (original US vinyl) again over the weekend.

The only thing that bugs me about it is the sound quality. She futzed around with it so much, and seemingly every instrument and voice was altered so much, that it's sometimes annoying. She was very similar to Peter Gabriel during this period, where they were so enamored with what could be accomplished in the studio that the lost sight of the forest for the trees.

 

THE masterpiece in the Kate Bush discography, hands down.