Kate Bush — The Kick Inside (1978)

The best was yet to come, but this is a remarkable debut.

The Dreaming may have been her most experimental album, Hounds of Love her most balanced, and Aerial her most mature, but even though the best was probably yet to come, it’s still the Kate Bush record I listen to the most. Despite its flaws, I find it a fascinating debut.

With this LP, we can practically say that she created a new language in pop, close to 19th-century romanticism, combined with art-rock and British folk. In contrast, the album’s production was sometimes excessively conventional and close to AOR and even progressive rock, with most of the collaborators coming from Alan Parsons Project’s band. Despite her youth (although she released the album at 19, many songs date from when she was between 15 and 17), from the first verse, she imposes her style. She has one of the most personal voices, halfway between pure beauty and bitter lament, between angelic and a soul in pain, capable of taking any song to her territory with registers and phrasing hitherto almost unheard of in pop music.

Just as I admire the ability of other artists (Oasis, Beatles) to pull all those apparently obvious melodies out of their sleeve, that lead half the world to think, why didn’t I think of that before? With Kate Bush, I feel that if she didn’t exist, all those strange and exotic melodies that only she could have created would remain…