Kate Bush "The Sensual World" RE CD (1989)

Details: Kate Bush, "The Sensual World," reissue CD, released on Columbia Records, 1989. Light/minimal wear on CD, pinch marks on cover art booklet near opening (light CD case wear). Play-tested, no issues.

Description: "Kate Bush had already set Molly Bloom’s breathless soliloquy from the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses to music when she discovered she couldn’t use it. Without his estate’s permission, and after his grandson snubbed her requests for a year, she rewrote it in her own words. By the time she’d finished, the title track to Kate Bush’s sixth album wasn’t just Molly’s memory of an erotic frisson: It was the sound of her busting out of her prison, her coming-of-age transformed into a coming-off-the-page.

It might seem like an uncanny echo of her debut single—another literary character overcome by desire, fantasizing about rolling around in fields—but Bush wasn’t the same singer who’d loaded the gothic romance of “Wuthering Heights” with the life-and-death fervor of teenage lust. “Someone said in your teens, you get the physical puberty, and between 28 and 32, mental puberty,” she said in 1989. “It does make you feel differently.”

The Sensual World is not a work of po-faced realism or post-Neverland dowdiness. Bush sings about falling in love with a computer, dressing up as a firework, and dancing with a dictator. She’s still in thrall to love, lust, loneliness, passion, pain, and pleasure. And she’s still fond of strange noises; listen closely to the title track and you might hear her brother, Paddy, swishing a fishing rod through the air.

But she’d never sounded more grounded than she did on these 10 songs, most of which are about regular people in regular messes, not disturbed governesses, paranoid Russian wives, or terrified fetuses. It was, she said, her most honest, personal album, and its stories play out like intimate vignettes rather than fantastical fairy tales." - Pitchfork

Grade: VG+/VG (CD/Booklet)

CD TRACK LISTING:

1. The Sensual World
2. Love And Anger
3. The Fog
4. Reaching Out
5. Heads We're Dancing
6. Deeper Understanding
7. Between A Man And A Woman
8. Never Be Mine
9. Rocket's Tail
10. This Woman's Work
11. Walk Straight Down The Middle