Kate Bush: "Flower of the Mountain"

Kate Bush combines the studio-fog mystery of a Pink Floyd or a Led Zeppelin with an auteurist vision so embarrassingly personal she can either seem hopelessly quaint or—or else—unbearably close. Her latest, Director’s Cut, changes little of that formula despite its strange conceit of reworking songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes, two subtly dated albums from her brief pre-recluse run as undisputed superstar.

“Flower of the Mountain” makes the most sense as a remake, realizing the original idea behind “The Sensual World” as a vehicle for Molly Bloom’s final monologue in Ulysses. Without as much of a typical focus on Bush’s carefully naive lyrics, here is something almost resembling chamber music in its recitation; it doesn’t inhabit Bush’s typical sort of character—well-defined and implacably sad—and instead unveils the indomitable, un-Bush-like Molly Bloom: nostalgic yet free, cynical yet overjoyed. Does this distance render part of Kate Bush’s unique appeal moot? It’s an issue for the rest of the album as well. As she draws herself out of this music, this music already hers that she may be trying to disown, slightly, there is less of her winningly unselfconscious belief in the ridiculous concepts she often imagines: imitating birdsong, embodying the son of Wilhelm Reich, and so forth.

It makes for, perhaps, a more universally tolerable record, but a less viscerally exciting one. Better some Bush than none at all, though, right? And as the mistily synthesized enticements of “Mountain” attest (complete with the uilleann pipes of the original), Bush seems helpless to not weave a weird, widescreen web even when she doesn’t recognize the landscape of her own devising.