Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been listening to Kate for many years now, but around the time Red Shoes came out, I thought Kate ceased to be a mad genius and was now only a garden-variety genius. And this album seemed a little ho-hum at first hearing. Sea of Honey has wonderfully campy prog rock feel, but also a heavy dose of sticky melancholy. There is pastoral tone (a la Lark Ascending) and mood of summer music complete with swooshing Hawaiian waves, cutesy touches (Italian theme, voices of Bertie and Harris and all these bloody birds) to the Sky of Honey. Me, I always loved the freaky side of Kate- Kite, Violin, Get out of my House, Waking the Witch, Walk Straight Down The Middle, Lily - rather than mushiness of This Woman's Work, and that's only hinted at on Aerial. And other than perfectly controlled King of the Hill and Pi, vocally Kate likes to let the quiver in her voice take over, and often loses pitch control in the lower registers. And with all this, after listening to the entire album a few times, I am completely taken with Aerial. It should be treated as a whole package. For starters, the album cover is great, the sound wave and sunset blended into surprisingly stark and beautiful picture. Inside the CD booklet, the pastel paintings, and photos of laundry and Kate's son flashing his milky whites are paired with a picture of someone wearing a supremely creepy "Indus Bird Mask", fashioned out of dead bird. A touch of shaman in Ms Domestic Goddess. No wonder Kate has been a muse to the likes of Outkast and Coil; there is more to her than meets the eye or the casual ear. The lyrics have the beautiful simplicity of Yeats poetry. Mrs Bartolozzi can be Virginia Woolf internal monologue about mundane tasks, a mournful tribute to the departed or Dedalus epiphany, of seeing a girl standing in the water, with skirts around her waist, looking like an exotic bird with white plumage, and suddenly realizing what's important in your life. Or simply the best laundry song ever written. And how about the unexpected delight of Pi, where strings of numbers are turned into a passionate hymn dealing with obsession and infinity. I like the fact that Kate is not willing to explain all her lyrics, and allows people to bring their own interpretations to the table. If you are musician, you should hear this album to witness an artist at the top of her game: it's not slapping few chords and verses together, this music is grown from a flash of underlying idea, and then woven like tapestry, dressed up, painted in delicate strokes. And Kate excels both in straightforward piano songs, like simple and devastating Coral Room, and dense and complex structures of Pi, Nocturne and Aerial. David Bowie may speak of Thomas Tallis, but it's Kate who writes an ecstatic ode to her son that seamlessly blends the old and the new, and sounds like an ancient court dance, complete with Renaissance guitar and violas orchestration, and contemporary song, all at once. And Aerial also has a piece of world music fusion so subtle that I actually missed it at first, until I realized that in Aerial Tal (Taal is a Hindi word for rhythm) Kate is singing a raga scale with the the birds... And after repeated listenings, the remarkable cycle and flow of Sky of Honey comes into full force. Discovering all the layers of Aerial is a great journey. If you think this music is too simple for your taste, there's always Bach's Mass in B Minor with contrapuntal harmonies so complex, your brain may curdle. In my opinion, among currently not deceased composers, very few people are in Kate's league. I don't know why Tori Amos, a gifted artist whose music somehow leaves me cold, is being compared to Kate; both play the piano, but they are guided by very different aesthetics. Bjork has long surpassed her Fairy Godmother Kate in sheer musical inventiveness, but she is in a freaky place and not accessible for some people. Kate is still on top of the hill and I am glad she came out of hiding to give us this Aerial.