Track Listing

1. Sensual World
2. Love And Anger
3. 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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1303 in Music
• Released on: 1991-07-08
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
1989's Sensual World remains Kate Bush's most mature, entrancing album. Expectations ran high for the long-awaited follow-up to her 1986 breakthrough The Hounds of Love, and she met them with this sometimes breathtaking, often introspective work. On songs like the erotic title track and the dramatic "Love and Anger", Bush charts the many rhythms of relationships with a keen eye for detail and less frilly bluster than usual. Elsewhere, with the tense "Between a Man and a Woman" and the lush "This Woman's Work" she virtually lays the foundation for Tori Amos's future success. Musically, Bush broadens her palette with the smart additions of Irish piper Davey Spillane, Balkan singers The Trio Bulgarka, and jazz bassist Eberhard Weber. --Michael Ruby

From Amazon.com
1989's Sensual World remains Kate Bush's most mature, entrancing album. Expectations ran high for the long-awaited follow-up to her 1986 breakthrough The Hounds of Love, and she met them with this sometimes breathtaking, often introspective work. On songs like the erotic title track and the dramatic "Love and Danger," Bush charts the many rhythms of relationships with a keen eye for detail and less frilly bluster than usual. Elsewhere, with the tense "Between a Man and a Woman" and the lush "This Woman's Work" she virtually lays the foundation for Tori Amos's future success. Musically, Bush broadens her palette with the smart additions of Irish piper Davey Spillane, Balkan singers The Trio Bulgarka, and jazz bassist Eberhard Weber. --Michael Ruby

Customer Reviews

Underestimated
Sounds like we have a consensus out there!

The Sensual World failed ( commercially ) to match the massive success of 'Hounds Of Love'. It's hard to know why. Maybe the time was right for that album - and who can deny that 'Running up that Hill' and 'Cloudbusting' are some of the finest singles ever. Maybe Kate just left it too long, as she often does, and the world had moved on.

The Sensual World succeeds as a great album however. It's cornerstone is undeniably 'This Woman's Work' which reliably brings tears to my eyes. I'm still not really sure what it's about - at one level Kate seems to be at the bedside of her dying mother, while on another the line 'I know you have a little life in you yet' could be about a mother to be. Genius.

Other stand outs are 'Reaching Out' about, well, reaching out - but Kate captures the beauty of such a simple, but essential gesture. 'Deeper Understanding' - about the way people are turning to technology for company is remarkably prescient and captures the mood of someone all alone,bar their computer. 'Never Be Mine' a song about regret - again executed perfectly, with some lovely fretless bass playing.

What I really like about this album is you're drawn into a different soundscape. 'Heads We're Dancing' and 'The Fog' are songs unlike anyone else's. The former is like a modern folk song - a dance with Hitler, Kate being unaware of his identity. The second a smoky misty evocation of a child's first swimming attempt really, for me captures the feeling of a river late at night.

Beautiful.

stodgy to brilliant

have to agree with others on this thread - after the astonishing one-two punch of the dreaming and hounds..., sensual world is spoilt by a lot of clatter, murk and fiddly-diddly production, and some (for kate) ordinary songs (i mean, can you whistle heads we're dancing? thought not). it is redeemed by the title track and the superb trio that finished the old vinyl running order - rockets tail (her & the trio bulgarka cackling over gilmour's guitar is just spine tingling), never be mine (lovely) and this womans work, which is her finest ever song. the CD then goes and breaks the spell by adding "straight down the middle" which represents all the worst traits of late 80s recording, which is a bit of a shame. still, by virtue of those 4 classics, better than virtually everything else around at the time.

Mesmerising sensuous introspection
Partly because her Best Of compilation only covers the period ending with her 1985 masterpiece Hound Of Love, forever fixing Kate's "official" canon as her first five albums, and partly due to the unprepossessingness of what one might (although I suspect only I actually do) refer to as Kate's "late-mature-period" works, The Sensual World has never resonated as loudly with the casual fan, the general listener, as her earlier classics.

After the stridency of HOL, TSW sounds almost like a retreat, an exercise in sensuous introspection. Many of the album's most successful moments (of which, of course, it has more than its fair share) are songs which announce themselves quietly, requiring repeated listens before the intricacies of their arrangements finally unravel themselves. Take, for example, 'The Fog', which sets off at a kind of electro-bossa nova lope, mixing in waves of strings and eventually electric guitar (interspersed with samples of speech) to create its haunting, hesitant, beauty.

Not every track is a success - 'Heads We're Dancing" is probably a folly too far - but when a songwriter is capable of crafting a creation of the simplicity and compassionate genius of 'This Woman's Work' and then singing it with the kind of Deep Soul-level of emotion which Kate seems to bring to every vocal performance, we can forgive her odd failure.

And when Kate does take risks more often than not they pay off: her use of the Trio Bulgarka is, in places, inspired - if you listen to the acapella first half of 'Rocket's Tail' I strongly suspect you're hearing the germ of Bjork's subsequent experimentation with Inuit choirs and more recent all-vocal album. As always, Kate is the master of space, giving her songs room to breathe - check out the short instrumental breaks in 'Never be Mine', or the ending of 'Deeper Understanding', for example.

Conversely, and proof of Kate's continuing development as a singer, is the feeling of claustrophobia evoked on the album's last track 'Walk Straight Down the Middle' as she sings "Can't move my arms/ Can't move my legs/ Can't say no I can't say yes...", seemingly through paralysed lips. Mesmerising.