Is "Aerial" good?

[David]

Consider the subtext, here: Data flows in streams. Streams of bits across a network, streams of consciousness, & even more rarely, streams of conciseness. But I digress.

Is "Aerial" good? I think that Kate Bush's new CD is quite good. This time around, domesticity is everywhere. The man who is usually present in her previous works is now no longer present, replaced by abstraction -- beautifully wrought abstraction. There's no "there" there, as Gertrude Stein said in "Everybody's Autobiography." Still, there's certainly something going on -- something that's personal, immediate & yet clearly processed through memory.

She's doing, in many ways, a 21st-century version of "Ulysses" on the second CD. This CD is a cross between Joyce, Wordsworth & Pink Floyd, amply demonstrating Kate's gift for moving between the sublime and the ridiculous. In one moment, she's as magnificent as pop music can be. At other times, she's daft as only she can be. Who else would think to foment tension between the microcosmic world of the domestic bower & the expansive, unbounded universe of a flight fantasy?

Plus, just like Stevie, she's clearly borrowing from some other English poets: namely George Meredith & his allegory "The Lark Ascending" -- although I think the album is suffused with the English ruralism of Vaughan Williams, whose c.1910 tone poem "The Lark Ascending" plots the aimless flight of birds in the swooping solo violin of a string orchestra.

See www.bartleby.com/246/680.html to read Meredith's poem. The last couplet is interesting, too, considering the title of Kate's album.