Waffle

I've been following this Keenspot forum thread because of its strong potential for TEH WEBCOMICS DRAMAAAH. So far, that hasn't happened, but Tiffany Ross reveals something interesting about Keenspot's terms that I should very much like to know more about (from the second page of the thread):

Without ads, keeping the site there does nothing for Keenspot and nothing for me but possibly starts building debt (I don't want to imagine what pull over 2mill pageviews a month is financially, especially not with anything to balance it out if most of them aren't displaying anything) and I already owe Keenspot enough money. (I imagine I'll find out when the quarter shows.)

What? I had heard things about Keenspot's terms before. I knew that Keenspot deducted hosting costs for any comic from that comic's share of ad revenue, but my understanding was always that cartoonists would not end up paying for Keenspot hosting them. Was I wrong?
If Keenspot cartoonists end up with a big invoice at the end of each quarter, then they are better off elsewhere, either self-hosting, forming a new network or paying $10 a month for a Webcomicsnation site. Those are not good terms for a publishing operation.

Update (November 8, 2005): It now appears that Keenspot foots its own server bills and that artists can't run up debts to them.

Four years after Hounds of Love, Kate comes up with a record that isn't nearly as good. The Sensual World doesn't try to be Hounds of Love part 2, which is a good thing, but the record lacks a strong direction of its own. The biggest problem with the record is a lack of what made the previous ones so appealing to me: compressed, urgent songwriting. For the first time, Kate allows the songs to drag on, or worse, dither before getting to the point. The track "Heads We're Dancing" is the best example of that: the rhythm track is innovative, there's a tension to the arrangement and the singing, but it feels padded, too long to carry the limited melodic and lyrical ideas. "Between a Man and a Woman" also suffers from this problem. In others like "Love and Anger", I hear the first signs of a certain awkwardness creeping into the melodies, a sense that what Kate is singing sits uneasily on top of a rhythm track.
There's plenty that's good on the record though. The title track is lush and erotic - Kate is probably the only arranger who can make uillean pipes sound sexy. "The Fog" has a lot of the urgency and complexity of the best material on Hounds of Love, "Never Be Mine" and "This Woman's Work" are sensitive, introspective and above all melodic pieces that should appeal to musical traditionalists; and best of all, "Rocket's Tail" is a monster composition, starting with a wailing chorus from the Trio Bulgarka, which counterpoints Kate's main vocal throughout the song, even after they're joined by Dave Gilmour's soaring guitar work and a backing band sounding more like Pink Floyd than Pink Floyd themselves did at the time. An exciting, cathartic song that showed Kate still had it.

Given the choice between The Sensual World and any of the previous five albums, I wouldn't pick The Sensual World to play. But the stronger tracks are doing fine in my MP3 collection.

[Note: as of today, this is no longer, strictly speaking, a countdown. When I started the series, I hadn't taken note of Aerial's German/Dutch release date, which was today. I have the album, have heard it, and will undoubtedly be influenced by these facts while reviewing the final three pre-Aerial Kate Bush records. But I'll stick with the series title and the schedule so that readers in the United States and ditto Kingdom can pretend I'm still gearing up for the momentous events of Monday, October 8.]

Having made the perfect album in 1982, Kate takes three years to produce one that, in places, is even better. However, there are some faults in Hounds of Love that relegate it to the status of only the second-best album ever made by anyone in the history of popular music, without all-caps, multiple exclamation marks or curly brass knobs (although I'll be more than happy to throw in some swearing). The production is a bit too clinical for my tastes although those big gated '80s drums that so many recent reviewers of Kate's work complain about suit the record just fine. A bigger problem is that the album has too many singles. Specifically, too many similar singles. The album opens with its biggest hit single, "Running Up That Hill", a sensual, sexy track built on a commando beat and synth vamps over a synth pedal tone. There are verses and choruses, but the overal feel is very free-form. For a while in the 1990s, I used to dislike this one, but I now think it's great again. The second track, the title track, is every bit as good, but is another beat-driven number with a loose verse-chorus structure on top of it. In fact, I have a twelve-inch single version of it in which Kate sings a completely unrelated melody over the same beats, fitting equally well - that's how much freedom the structure gives her. The third track, "The Big Sky" is another rhythm-based number with free-flowing song over it, and by this time, it's getting to be a bit much. It's the weakest of the three and while perfectly listenable and a hit single in its own right (it's got a great bass part by Killing Joke bassist Youth), it might have been better kept for a B-side or CD bonus track. You'll understand that I'm only grumbling about it because the rest of the record is so good; in any case, it picks up momentum quickly enough with the fourth track, "Mother Stands For Comfort". That is actually one where the clinical production enhances the work: the coldness of the drum machines makes for an exciting contrast with the soft vocals and especially German jazz bassist Eberhard Weber's moving fretless bass accompaniment. I love the bass, I always make a point of listening closely to what it does in any song, but nowhere else that I know of has the instrument carried so much emotion. "Cloudbusting", a rhythmic, free-flowing track with repetitive backing from two drummers and a string sextet, closes side A of the album, the singles-oriented part that is properly entitled "Hounds of Love"

Side B has its own title, "The Ninth Wave" and is much more conceptual. It does the impossible by topping the undescribable goodness that is The Dreaming for 20 minutes. The seven songs are held together by a thin storyline about a woman's near-drowning, near-death experience and rescue from the water, but that story is merely a peg for her to hang a series of mood pieces on. It starts dreamily with "And Dream of Sheep" conveying the protagonist's slow fading in and out of awareness through Satie-like piano vamps and crystal clear singing. The second song, "Under Ice" intends to scare the bejeesus out of the listener. Having succeeded at that, Kate turns the fear factor up a notch with the hallucinatory, claustrophobic "Waking The Witch", a collage of electronic noises, sound effects, grunts and shrieks similar to the dialogue sequences in "Get Out Of My House" on The Dreaming. If that sounds disorganised, it isn't - everything makes musical sense. That death metal grunt, by the way, is Kate's own voice slowed down.
Panic gives way to acceptance as the nearly-drowned protagonist moves out of her body to watch her loved ones at home. "Watching You Without Me" is a serene, simple song with little in the way of frills. It sounds vaguely Chinese, especially with the strange backing vocals towards the end.
The most upbeat moment of "The Ninth Wave" is "Jig of Life", a hybrid Celtic/Hungarian dance piece with changing time signatures. It has the Irish folk musicians from The Dreaming again and works really well to lift the spirits. Lyrically, it does just that: the protagonist is lifted from her slide towards death by the vision of herself as an old lady telling her that

This moment in time
It doesn't belong to you
It belongs to me
And to your little boy and to your little girl...
Where on your palm is my little line
When you're written in mine as an old memory

which for some reason always makes me choke up.
Speaking of choking up, "Hello Earth" hits that spot more than once in its six minutes of playing time. Compositionally, it's one of Kate's most daring and most succesful ever, which is saying a lot. The opening notes manage to be simultaneously quiet and urgent (partly due to Kate's vocal delivery, which is assured and clear as a bell), and what follows is a slow-building storm of a song, with the drums kicking in at a Pink Floyd tempo before disappearing into the first of two choral sections. It builds up again with the main melody, this time backed by the Irish folk guys, a response melody sung by Kate as overdubbed backing vocals, and then the second, longer, choral section, shifting the mood to one of loss and longing.

"The Morning Fog" is almost an afterthought. It fits; it promises hope and renewal. But alone among the tracks on this wonderful album, it would have difficulty standing up on its own. It has some nice bass and guitar work though and works well as a coda allowing the listener to recover from the rollercoaster ride that is "The Ninth Wave".

Hounds of Love, then, is really two great albums compressed into 40-odd minutes' playing time. It's essential. The 1997 remaster has a few bonus tracks that are okay; a bit of a grab bag to be honest. Simply Vinyl in the UK released a high-quality vinyl edition a few years ago, but it no longer appears to be on their catalogue. It is that vinyl version I used as a reference for this review.

Link of interest: Choral arranger Michael Berkeley on the creation of the choral sections of "Hello Earth"

The Eye of the Underworld wraps up today on Webcomicsnation. For a series I drew eight years ago, it's pretty good, actually. Go read it from the beginning if you didn't follow it during its one-month run.

Eye was just beginning to reach the lower rungs of the Webcomicsnation All-Time Top 100 in the past week. Again, quite good for something that has been available online for years although with something like 2 billion people online it will be a while before everyone has seen it. Compared to The Double's performance (peaked at #30 when there was less competition, now at #56), it's even more of an achievement, because The Double was new to more of my and Geir's regular readership and was twice as long, meaning twice as many pages to count towards its ranking in the top hundred. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that as with all online ranking systems, there's a power distribution going on: Position #96 has less than half the pageviews of Position #56, and the Number One comic (currently the political satire comic Neil Lisst) has something like 20 times the pageviews as Number 56 (However, if Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan were a Webcomicsnation comic, it would trounce the Number One day after day).

The next long story will have even more competition, and will be even shorter, but we will nevertheless try and get Christmas at Blocksberg into that Top 100 as well. However, that won't begin to run until December. Next week, we'll have a quick two-pager, Thousandstab, followed by some sketches, previews, odds and ends, posted irregularly. There is one other two-pager in my archives that I will try to prepare and post, but I haven't been able to find it. If and when I do, it will show up on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website.
Update: I have found good source images for Staff Cutbacks and it will appear on the website next Wednesday and Thursday.

Curse of the Were-Rabbit was hilarious, every bit as good as I expected it to be. Go watch it. What I like about the Wallace and Gromit series in general is that it isn't just funny but very well staged, lit and shot, and this new episode made for the big screen was no exception.
The movie was clearly a subtitler's nightmare. Many puns went untranslated or had very tenuous translations. Luckily the audience picked up on them anyway.
Sidsel was slightly bothered by the showing of a short animated cartoon before the movie: a computer-generated story about penguins getting into trouble during Christmas. I liked both the short itself and the fact that they were showing it before the main feature; I'd love to see that tradition permanently restored, in fact.

Ooops, silly me. Yesterday's comic was set to update on the wrong day so apparently you got no new comic yesterday and two today. Don't forget to read Yesterday's comic to catch up with today's.

The difficult question when it comes to writing about The Dreaming isn't so much "Can I write about this record without gushing?" as "Should I?". Having thought about it a bit, I can't see why not. The Dreaming is not merely the best Kate Bush record; it's THE BEST RECORD EVER MADE BY ANYONE IN THE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC!!! It's perfect from beginning to end: strange, innovative, melodic, exciting, packed with raw emotion, violence and clever storytelling. It also has Kate braying like a donkey.

But that doesn't happen until the end. "Sat In Your Lap" opens the record with a pounding cymbal-less drum pattern, Stevie Wonder-inspired piano, ska-like afterbeats and Kate's characteristic banshee voice; but it's immediately and startlingly different from anything on the previous album. The Dreaming's melody lines are shorter than on earlier albums, taking a back seat to the tapestry of sound and rhythm. Having said that, "There Goes a Tenner" and "Pull Out The Pin" still showcase Kate's piano playing. In the former, it's part of another ska rhythm, somewhat slowed down; in the latter, it is woven into the menace created by Danny Thompson's double bass and Brian Bath's eerie, effect-heavy guitars.

The next two songs are the fast waltz "Suspended in Gaffa" and "Leave it Open" with its slowed-down and muted heavy metal stomp. Jimmy Bain (then of Dio) plays bass on that track as well as "Sat in Your Lap" and the album closer "Get Out Of My House". In "Leave it Open", Kate's voice is distorted by a flanging effect which makes her use of her lower register extra scary.
The second half of the album begins with the title track, notoriously backed by Rolf Harris on didgeridu. It seems to be some sort of British tradition to make fun of Rolf Harris and claim that his didgeridu playing was the reason the record wasn't commercially succesful, but it's not a tradition I want anything to do with. The didgeridu sounds like every other didgeridu outside of a Gjallarhorn record and the album made the UK top 10 and spawned two hit singles, one of which was that title track. So there. It's a good track; not the album's best but sitting innocuously in the middle. Through a short bridging section, it leads into the much better "Night of the Swallow" a dramatic track with Irish folk instrumentation courtesy of Bill Whelan. Vocally, "Night of the Swallow" is a tour de force in which Kate allows her voice to break just enough to convey the character's anguish and frustration.

"All The Love", by contrast, has a sad, elegiac mood, ending with choirboy singing and answering machine messages bidding farewell in response to the lead vocals. It's the closest on the album to old-style Kate Bush.

"Houdini" alternates between moody menace in the verses, sexy sweetness in the first parts of the choruses and panic and horror in the second parts of the choruses. It's quite a ride, but not as much of a ride as "Get Out Of My House", the highlight of an already perfect album. It's a violent, layered track with pounding drums, echoing guitars and throbbing heavy metal bass. The vocals alone contain three separate musical threads: the repetitive shrieks of "Get out of my house!", the repeated, high-pitched taunts of "With my key I – With My Keeper I" and the litany of things found in the house. The second half of the song evolves into a duet followed by animal sounds and drum talk. Play it loud; if you're already playing the album loud, play this track louder.

Many of the lyrics feature a character, the Fictional!Kate, in a moment of intense concentration and/or crisis. The protagonist of "Pull Out The Pin" is a Vietnamese guerilla about to make a kill. The bank robber protagonist of "Tenner" is about to pull of a heist. Their stories are compressed into the moment where "it" happens.

Then there's the references to chains and bonds, keys, locks, and crime. The character in "Gaffa" is struggling through invisible bonds (as if restrained by gaffa tape) towards an unattainable goal. The Fictional!Kate of "Leave it Open" responds to "a trigger come cocking" by shutting herself off from the world, but heals and learns to leave herself open and let the weirdness in. In addition to the bank robbing tale of "Tenner", there's the drug smuggler narrative of "Night Of The Swallow"; in that song, Kate takes on the role of the smuggler's wife trying to prevent the smuggler from going on one more trip. The penultimate song "Houdini" features the line that was the tagline for the original vinyl edition: With a kiss, I pass the key - the key being the one Houdini will use to free himself from his chains. "Houdini" actually weaves two stories: the one of Houdini's death in the fishtank, and the one of his widow holding a séance - ostensibly to contact Houdini in the afterlife but really to expose the medium for the fraud she believes him to be. The medium, however, uses the secret passphrase her late husband gave her.
The final song returns to the themes of violation and seclusion, and mentions keys again. In "Get Out of the House" Fictional!Kate protects herself, her house, her life, herself against an unseen intruder. Withdrawing into herself, she sees a part of herself as a concierge barring and bolting the doors that would otherwise have provided an opening for the intruder. When that fails, she engages the intruder in a "Two Magicians" routine, in which they take turns transforming themselves into something stronger than the opponent's last shape. Fictional!Kate ends up as a mule, braying and ugly, but victorious.
Much has been written in the papers lately about Kate Bush's intense wish for privacy, and especially for safety from the prying eyes of the press. "Leave it Open" and "Get Out of My House" show that this desire to be left alone has long been present in Bush's mind and in her recorded music. "Gaffa" and "All The Love" show why she values privacy – because the intrusions of public life distract a person from her own goals and from the pursuit of intimacy with those who are close to her.
Or maybe not. Is it worth the trouble to sum up the meaning of The Dreaming in a few words of analysis and criticism? The only thing that could sum up this album is the album. If The Dreaming was a world, it would need a map the size of that world to represent it fully. It is that rich, with more emotion, meaning and passion crammed into its 43 minutes than many artists can hope to portray in a lifetime.

It's fun to try though; The Dreaming excites me not just emotionally but also intellectually, and I can't help but try to create a clearer picture of just what makes all the pieces fit together so well. But maybe I should just have gushed.

The Dreaming is essential, with polished brass knobs on and extra swearing. Did I mention that you should play it loud? And that often when "Get Out Of My House" comes on I can't resist the urge to dance (when no one is watching)?

I had my review of Never For Ever all written up in my head. I'd given the record another spin at the studio during the afternoon and it confirmed what I was going to write. Then I made the mistake of taking the CD home and playing it on the stereo at high volume. Ehrm.
Okay.
I was going to write that Never For Ever was a transitional album, with Kate's new production approach, learned through working with Peter Gabriel in 1980, hastily grafted on to material that couldn't really carry it off. Certainly some of the songs were old by the time the album was recorded: The opening track, "Babooshka", is widely bootlegged as a demo from before the release of The Kick Inside, and "Violin" was played on Kate's only tour in early 1979. Some of the songs might have been newer but still have the stylistic features of earlier Kate Bush compositions; they are, at heart, piano-backed, melody-based songs rather than the rhythmic, textured pieces of The Dreaming and Hounds of Love.
I was also going to write that the album didn't hang together very well, that despite its short length, it has several songs that outstay their welcome and that the thing as a whole drags on a bit. I was going to mention that the three indisputably great songs on the album, "Babooshka", "Army Dreamers" and the spine-chilling "Breathing", are all on the The Whole Story collection anyway, and that that compilation is a pretty good starting point for newcomers to Her Kateness. Finally, I had concluded, in my head, that many of the songs are clever and well-done rather than engaging and that the record as a whole lacks the emotional intensity and urgency of her best work.
I suppose all of those things are still true. But it is also true that when a record doesn't quite hit home, it's often because you're not playing it loud enough. Never For Ever has quite a few rocking moments (she sounds like Nina Hagen in "Violin" and "The Wedding List") and uses dynamics and crescendo a lot in the arrangements, so playing it at high volume definitely improves it. It still isn't my favorite Kate Bush album, but it's a cracking good listen nonetheless.

Just once, I'd like Paint Shop Pro to shut down the normal way, as a result of me hitting Alt-F4, instead of either crashing in the course of normal operations or crashing on exit. At least in the crashes-on-exit, my work is saved even if my MRU listings and most recent tool options are not.

Might as well wish for a pony though. Paint Shop Pro versions 7 and 8 had showstopper bugs that were almost terrible enough to turn me off the software, and Paint Shop Pro has now become a Corel product so it's unlikely that versions 9 and 10 will give me any joy.

If I could afford Photoshop CS 2, I'd batch-convert my thousands of *.pspimage files to Photoshop documents and rid myself of this poorly-coded, mis-designed excuse for a graphics program once and for all. I'd spend several months grumbling about how PS CS 2 handles vector shapes, but I'd get used to it eventually, and it would work.

Would it really have been so bad if Kate had done the obvious thing and become a piano-driven singer-songwriter, churning out an album a year focusing on just the songs? Lionheart has gone down in history as one of Kate's lesser albums, a quickie intended to cash in on the success of The Kick Inside, released the same year. I disagree with history's verdict. It's true, I'll admit, that Kate's second record doesn't surprise the way her debut does, but on its own merits, it's a very strong album. There's no sense at all that the songs were mere leftovers from the previous batch - more likely they were deliberately kept in reserve.
The recording, arrangements and production seem more cohesive and focused than on The Kick Inside, and the finished product may well have benefited from a faster recording process. If you have good songwriting and no immediate ambition to try something completely new, you might as well cut down on the frills and get on with it.
Lionheart is one of the most worn-out records in my vinyl collection. I've mentioned this on the blog before; I've since managed to clean it up a bit and my copy's now quite listenable again.
The songs themselves? Sex, arsenic murder, secret homosexuality, the confusion of a child faced with the machinations of the adults around him, some more sex, piano, voice, some good banshee shrieks... business as usual. Slightly less twee in feel in the gentler numbers, more balanced in the harder ones. "Fullhouse", "Wow", "Hammer Horror" and "Don't Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake" alone make the record well worth buying. One like this a year from 1978 to 2005? I'd have bought every one of them. Highly Recommended, and no, I won't be saying that of every Kate album.