Hello Earth: The Music Of Kate Bush (Winter & Winter)
Theo Bleckmann
Released October 15, 2011
NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll Best New Albums 2012
YouTube:
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About:
After tackling American maverick composer Charles Ives and receiving a
Grammy nomination for it, vocalist Theo Bleckmann now takes on the mysterious
songbook of British pop recluse Kate Bush. This project goes beyond merely
re-creating Kate Bush’s music but taking it into other realms of sound and
interpretation. Bush’s œuvre is indeed mysterious and often enigmatic in
nature: unusual song forms, oracular lyrics and unpredictable meter- and
harmony-changes are an anomaly in pop music, making it the perfect vehicle for
Bleckmann’s distinctive, interpretive spirit and interest in the unusual. Even
though Bush still remains a household name, it is fair to say that her music is
not your usual run-of the mill boy-meets-girl/boy-looses-girl fare. Her use of
British and Irish myths, her references to psychology, literature and film, her
meticulously multi-layered productions and her unusually high voice make her
idiosyncratic body of work challenging for other artists to interpret.
Bleckmann first heard Bush as a young teenager and was immediately intrigued…
“Her music has this thing that I love in art: you’re instantly drawn into
someone’s universe without really knowing why but somehow understanding
everything in your heart.” A lot of teenage pop heroes came and went, but
Kate Bush remained a constant in Bleckmann’s life. “Her songs and records
never became obsolete ? – I now realize that the way she layered sound, speech
and music became a major influence for my live electronic looping
aesthetic.”
For »Hello Earth!« Bleckmann chose songs that warranted a different
interpretation.
Joining him in this venture is long-time collaborators percussionist John
Hollenbeck and electric bassist Skúli Sverrisson and keyboardist Henry Hey and
violinist/guitarist/vocalist Caleb Burhans, who can also be heard on
Bleckmann’s Berlin-CD. “When I set out to do this, I knew right away that
these were the perfect musicians for this kind of project. “
Hollenbeck, a brilliant composer and arranger of his own, contributed his vast
orchestrational palette and ideas to the music, including the use of crotales
which greatly shaped the sound of this record. Sverrisson and Bleckmann also go
back many years having worked together in various configurations (including
Laurie Anderson’s band). Sverrisson’s profound sense of sound and layering and
compositional instincts became essential to the music. Keyboard wizard (and
newly appointed musical director for George Michael) Henry Hey, whom Bleckmann
works with for the first time, contributed a vast array of sounds and
possibilities, transforming and bringing to life Bleckmann’s initial ideas.
Caleb Burhans is perhaps one of the most sought after young musician/composers
on the NY downtown scene today: “I wanted someone who could play many
different instruments, loop, improvise and sing, which pretty much eliminated
everyone but Caleb.”
»Hello Earth!« is a journey into Kate Bush’s world through Bleckmann’s voice
and interpretive vision: “Running Up That Hill”, which opens the
record, gets a mysteriously ambient treatment. The lyric suggests switching
gender in order to fully experience the other, which is where Bleckmann’s
journey begins. “Suspended In Gaffa’s” thumping waltz feel is now a
suspended multi-metric virtuosic vehicle for the band, with Bleckmann (together
with the other musicians) proclaiming in jolting harming: “I want it
all”. “And Dream Of Sheep”, a song about being lost and
shipwrecked at sea, turns into an ambient dream through Bleckmann’s use of
vocal looping and Sverrison’s spherical bass playing then segueing into the
unsettling “Under Ice”; a tale of entrapment under ice (a definite
choice of song for Bleckmann who once was a competitive figure skater in his
teens). “Violin” turns into a distorted death metal thrash, echoing
the lyric’s destructive fierceness.
The title track, “Hello Earth”, keeps most of its original elements,
including the inclusion of the Georgian folk song “Zinzkaro” in which
the violin is now taking over the main melody while Bleckmann provides the
harmony. “All The Love”, however, gets a more radical transformation,
again stripping away a lot of the original, Bleckmann stretches the original
melody and harmonies and inserts a vocalise into the middle. The last verse is
delivered over a static vocal and violin loop, bringing out the song’s
fragility and feeling of regret.
Set in a “Berlin bar”, “Saxophone Song” probably gets the
most jazz treatment while “Army Dreamers” has been completely
stripped of most of its original accompaniment and turned into an antiphonal drinking
song as a lament over a lost generation of soldiers.
The record closes with Bush’s most well known (and covered) song “This
Woman’s Work”. Here, Bleckmann accompanies himself with looped voices
leading us out of the initial gender switching “Running Up That Hill”
to his exit by singing “make it go away, make it go away… now”.
Bleckmann treats Bush’s music as he would that of Charles Ives, Thelonius Monk,
George Gershwin, Guillaume de Machaut, Joni Mitchell or any other composer he
takes on: with love, respect and an insatiable curiosity for new possibilities.
Track Listing:
1. Running Up That Hill 6:37
2. Suspended In Gaffa 4:14
3. And Dream Of Sheep 4:37
4. Under Ice 3:20
5. Violin 2:42
6. Hello Earth 4:59
7. Cloudbusting 3:44
8. All The Love 6:01
9. Saxophone Song 4:58
10. Army Dreamers 2:30
11. The Man With The Child In His Eyes 4:35
12. Watching You Without Me 4:13
13. Love And Anger 3:52
14. This Woman’s Work 4:00
Personnel:
Theo Bleckmann: vocals, live electronic voice processing, toy piano, glockenspiel, caxixi
Henry Hey: piano, minimoog synthesizer, fender rhodes piano, prepared harpsichord, voice
Skúli Sverrisson: electric bass, voice
Caleb Burhans: electric five string violin, electric guitar, voice
John Hollenbeck: drums, percussion, crotales, voice
Recorded March 2011, at Brooklyn Recording, New York
Recording engineer: Ben Liscio
Engineers: Philipp Heck and Adrian von Ripka (11, 13, 14)
Producer: Stefan Winter
Executive producer: Mariko Takahashi
Photography: John Labbe
Review:
The 1980s possessed an incongruous hope for the
future against a backdrop of possible nuclear annihilation, as if in the
darkest of times, society retreated to a naive state. This is a generalization
that doesn’t, obviously, represent the entire gamut of human experience, yet it
was there all the same. The majority of singer and composer Kate Bush’s music
came from that decade, and there was always something about her music that
seemed representative of that cloak of innocence; a touch of fairy tale magic,
even when singing about loss, heartbreak or the cost of war. Since then, cynicism has been adopted by much of
society as the interface with the human experience, and so it’s supremely
refreshing that singer Theo Bleckmann embraced the magic and optimism
from which the source material for Hello Earth! The
Music of Kate Bush sprang. Of the fourteen album tracks, all but two were
recorded in the 1980s, half of which were released on Bush’s Hounds Of
Love (EMI, 2000).
An appealing aspect of Bush’s music has always been her lack of
self-consciousness in baring her heart and soul through her music. It’s the
kind of thing that is easy to mock, but the correct reaction is to respect the
hell out of it. Bleckmann shows the same courage Bush displayed when recording
the original versions.
The best example of Bleckmann’s outstanding treatment of the Bush songbook is
in opening track, “Running Up That Hill,” which rings with sincerity
and beauty, not to mention the glassine shimmer of the Fairlight CMI digital
effects that grew in popularity on many pop and rock albums of the 1980s.
Bleckmann’s version is an astounding facsimile of the original, a feat outshone
by the song’s immaculate tunefulness.
In addition to unabashed sincerity, Bush also had a predisposition to drama
bordering on the theatrical. In the hands of a less talented artist, this is
the kind of thing that can quickly devolve into the comical. Bleckmann,
however, displays the same uncanny knack for making it so easy to buy in, to
accept the drama as genuine tension and the theater as the song’s reality.
Another delicious example of Bleckmann taking ownership of the Bush songbook is
his transformation of “Army Dreamers,” from Bush’s stately waltz into
an a catchy anthem more akin to shouting up at tavern ceilings than spoken
elegantly in formal dancehalls. But Bleckmann doesn’t execute full-on costume
changes for every Bush composition. Comparing Bush and Bleckmann versions,
sometimes the before and after pictures carry a striking resemblance. The
details hidden within the differences, however, are often quite breathtaking,
as evidenced in how Bleckmann tweaks Bush’s conventional piano solo tune
“And Dream of Sheep” into a little lullaby bobbing away on an open
sea of ambient effects and vocal looping, or on “Hello Earth!,” in
which Bleckmann gains an emotional impact greater than that of the original by
adopting a restraint that trades in on some of the sensationalism the Bush’s
recording.
The highlight of the album, arguably, is “Cloudbusting,” with its
rhythmic marching formations juxtaposed against the piano exuberance of notes
scrambling up a flight of stairs, and Bleckmann’s vocal bounce a pleasant
fusion of the two extremes. The end result is that “Cloudbusting” is
as complex as it is catchy.
The best of tribute albums possess all the soul of the original, while the
heartbeat and blood flow is purely that of the music’s adopter. Bleckmann must
understand this on some level, because the music he presents makes it easy to
fall in love with Bush’s music all over again, while presenting facets so
divergent as for Bleckmann’s album to stand on its own two legs, requiring no
knowledge or love of the source of the music’s inspiration. In this, Hello
Earth! is an unqualified success.
Dave Sumner (All About Jazz)
