Never For Ever was proving ground for Kate Bush's experimental weirdness. Her 1982 followup, The Dreaming, taken after the aboriginal concept of a link to God or heaven, takes that direction to the core and is Kate's most innovative and weirdest (in a great sense) album ever. Weird vocal stylings, clever instrumentation and lyrics characterize this album. The engaging single "Sat In Your Lap" is about someone who's too lazy to work, favoring the ivory tower of the intellectual, but has the misconception that "knowledge something that is sat in your lap." In the end, she sings "I hold a cup of wisdom, But there is nothing within. My cup, she never overfloweth, And 'tis I that moan- and groaneth."

"There Goes A Tenner" is about a heist that goes awry, with Kate affecting a slight cockney accent in parts and featuring a music hall-like piano. Throughout there are some male vocal interjections, such as the police and that classic line "What's all this, then?" Funniest lyric: "I hope you remember/To treat the gelignite tenderly for me."

"Pull Out The Pin" seems to be about a Vietnamese lying in ambush for an American soldier, ready to pull out the pin and toss the grenade at him. In the chorus, Kate's voice rises to a frenzied pitch when she sings "I love life." The sobriety of the song is underlined: "Just one thing in it/me or him."

I don't know what the heck gaffa is, as in "Suspended In Gaffa" and its skipping music-hall piano and a quick one-two-three string waltz, but the girl in there is clearly a timid soul, scared of change, unwilling to be a Pandora.

Kate "lets the weirdness in" in "Leave It Open." Her vocals are in many styles, distorted lower register, echoing high-pitched girlish, stretched tape vocals, and wailing. As for the weirdness, the male refrain keeps repeating, "Harm in us, but the power to arm."

The droning weird title track is about life in the bush, no, not Kate, but in the Australian desert, where the habits of white man play havoc with nature, be it hitting kangaroos in the land rover or exploiting aborigine land for mineral wealth. "The civilised keep alive/The territorial war./See the light ram through the gaps in the land./Erase the race that claim the place/And say we dig for ore, Or dangle devils in a bottle/And push them from the pull of the bush" demonstrates that "civilizing mission"

"Night of the Swallow" is about helping an escaped criminal by a hired plane, the swallow representing freedom. There's some Uileann pipes that give this a Celtic tinge during the refrain.

The lonely, one-sided, and reincarnated soul in "All The Love" wants people to love her, but is oblivious to the other people, represented by a young boy singing "We needed you to love us too. We wait for your move." Also present is the observation that dying brings out the grief and love and how she's turned on by the attention. The sighs and multiple phone message machines at the end is an interesting touch.

The soft piano ballad "Houdini" and some of the lyrics incorporate the album cover, where Houdini gets the key that'll unbind him from the water tank trick by kissing his assistant, who has the key in her mouth. Her bellowing voice comes in here: "With your spit still on my lip, you hit the water" and there are moments when she wishes he'd drown. When I heard the line "Rosabel believe" I thought it was "Roosevelt bleed" and I thought "What the...?" There is a nice lyrical string section that plays after the bellowing bits.

"Get Out Of My House" is a really bizarre one, told from the point of view of a woman with a house analogy incorporated, telling a man to, well... There are some erotic overtones "no stranger's feet will enter me/I wash the panes/I clean the stains" And in line with cleaning of the house, it seems to imply that men make a mess of her life, but there are multiple meanings, as the house also represents her neurotic mental psyche, as it's full of her madness, mistakes, and fight. She screams out the title, and even bellows like a mule (!!!) to demonstrate her stubbornness in not letting anyone in.

One of the weirdest but most wonderful from Kate Bush. Even though she seemed to go mainstream in her followup, she continued the innovation of the Dreaming in the concept album portion.

In her first three albums (THE KICK INSIDE, LIONHEART, and NEVER FOREVER) Bush established herself as an etherial-voiced, highly accomplished artist with a penchant for the macabre; in THE DREAMING she suddenly sheds the deliberately adopted artifice of her earlier work and simply explodes as a truly great iconoclastic musician of extraordinary vision with a ferocious passion that would daunt even the likes of American contemporary Patti Smith. The entire album is slickly done in terms of music; the sound, which relies a great deal on percussion and bass lines and synthesizers, is at once as smooth as spit and polish can make it and yet as emotionally raw as a gaping wound. And each track, although extremely diverse in terms of material, feeds into the overwhelming power of the album as a whole.

Always attracted to macabre and violent imagery, Bush finally takes off her velvet gloves and reaches directly into some very dark material indeed: the futility of knowledge and the frustration of ambition, the spider-like evil of war and the destructiveness of colonialism, and the invasion of personal space made by modern society. The vehicles by which she conveys these themes are amazing: an American solider stalked by a Vietcong, presented from the Vietcong's point of view (Pull Out The Pin), a botched bank robbery (There Goes A Tenner), the adventures of a drug smuggler (Night of the Swallow), the ecological and social carelessness of the English in Australia (The Dreaming.) The result is surrealistic, horrific, passionate, and hypnotically fascinating from start to finish, and the passage of time has not so much dimmed its power as enhanced it.

A great many people--including many who count themselves fans of both her earlier and later work--loathe this particular recording for its dissonance (a friend who walked in upon me one day while I was listening to it actually mistook Bush for Yoko Ono) and violence, but love it or hate it Bush's THE DREAMING far outreaches the similar-sounding SECURITY and SO by Peter Gabriel, and it remains a landmark of 20th Century high-art music.

Okay, I'm not sure what category of music _The Dreaming_ REALLY belongs to. There is an emphasis on vocals, hooks, and strong melodies, yet the sheer musical eclecticism and wild performance make for something quite beyond your johnny-pop music. Perhaps if she had a discography of 1000 albums and she were very popular, she might be afforded her own section (at the music store: rock, jazz, classical, metal, Kate Bush). But this album's defiance of traditional characterizations is no small part of its allure, nor is it a mean artistic feat. This is Kate Bush' perfect marriage of eclectic imagination, enthralling performance, and acute songcraft. Insofar as experimental pop goes, few albums are this listenable and artistically successful.

And that performance...Bush sings like a woman possessed, essentially becoming different characters in each song. "Houdini", with its sensuous, snaky fretless bass and dreamy atmosphere, has Bush singing at times with the sweetness of the dappling of things and at others like an irate lioness. Musically, she is just as brilliant as she is with her voice. Her sense of rhythm and texture is remarkable, as is her ability to transform her influences (both in terms of artists and musical resources) into something very unique and strange. Her reconstruction of Celtic-folk dance on "Night of the Swallows" is sublime; her tense, driving beat and sneaky vocals on "There Goes a Tenner" is indelibly catchy; "Sat in Your Lap" kicks off with an infectious piano & drums shuffle, and Bush's vocals range from snappy utterances ("I see the people workin', I see it workin' for them") to faux-Broadway wails ("just when I think I'm king, I must admit..."). On "Leave It Open", Bush's singing altered with a malicious, metallic effect and is accompanied by chanting male voices and screeching synths, rising to layers of weird vocals caught up in heavy, gated percussion and terminating with Bush's voice run through tape-effects.

Despite this album's weirdness and somewhat introverted nature, it is catchy and unfailingly fun to listen to. This is gold, I tell you. Very highly recommended!

I did not believe what everyone said about this album. What a fool I was.

I've known Kate Bush for a long time and have always liked her work. I got The Kick Inside and Hounds Of Love years ago (and I love them!), but I've always seen "The Dreaming" as "the strange album".

Then, a couple of months ago, I got it from a local store. It was an import (as Kate has never had any CD released in Brazil) and was a little expensive, but what the hell, Kate was worth a try.

I absolutely hated it. Every single song almost hurt my ears the first time I listened to it.

Then I read all those reviews you see here and simply could not understand everyone's hype. It could not be possible. Was I going crazy? I had to "get" the album's brilliance too!

I kept trying and listening to it every single day at least once. Then, suddenly, these songs started to grow on me, one by one. The first one (which eventually is my favourite) was Suspended In Gaffa. Then, Sat In Your Lap, The Dreaming, Houdini, Get Out Of My House (that song SCARES me!), every single one started getting me. Now I'm hooked bigtime!

Believe me, all of these songs are worthy. Every one tells a story with a diverse and sometimes absurd theme. It's impressive how Kate could think of those themes, create a magical space and take us there.

And, yes, the album is timeless. I have never heard any of these songs before January of this year and they do not sound old at all. The drums and keyboards are so perfectly arranged that you can't tell if they were recorded in 1970, 1982 or last year.

If I could ever choose one album to call daring, The Dreaming would be it. It is completely understandable that it did not have the chart success the others had, you need to listen to it many times and focus on the lyrics and the rhythm to be able to appreciate it fully. This isn't music you would find on the radio or on TV.

I've put off writing a review up until now of "The Dreaming" simply because I wasn't sure where to start with it. Yes, it's sheer musical genius, and, of course, it's one of my favorite albums of all time, but that by no means comes close to explaining what this album is and the effect that it has had and continues to have on me.

I remember when and where I first heard Kate Bush, back in 1986, a sophomore in high school, and a friend popped in a cassette in the car, and "Sat in Your Lap" began to play. Immediately, I was transfixed, speechless, mesmerized, and in due course I went out and bought all of Kate's works, basically anything I could get my hands on. No other artist has had that kind of effect on me, one where I HAD to know more, right then. Kate seized my attention, pulled me into her world, turned around, slammed the door, and had forever thrown away the key.

"The Dreaming" is dynamic and complex. While "Hounds of Love" lulls you, "The Dreaming" assaults you and demands that you listen. It has frightening moments: the other-worldly shrieks during the nightmare waltz "Suspended in Gaffa" still give me chills, and the end of "Leave It Open" has Kate singing `we let the weirdness in' backwards, which creates, to put it mildly, an eerie effect. Digeridos and bullroars are alongside multi-layered vocal tracks that ensure you will likely hear something new each time you listen. Kate continues to explore the never-ending quest for knowledge in "Sat in Your Lap", then delves into aboriginal myth in the title track "The Dreaming". One of my personal favorites out of all Kate's songs is the passionate "Night of the Swallow", and "Houdini" has the most beautiful string arrangements I have ever heard. However, all of the descriptions I could give, chaos, passion, madness, fear, resignation, anger, barely begin to scratch the surface of what "The Dreaming" is. I simply suggest repeated listenings, though preferably not in a darkened house.

Kate produced "The Dreaming" and took many risks while doing so. Many were expecting more piano ballads similar to "The Kick Inside" and "Lionheart". Its sales faired poorly, and many reviewers weren't sure what to make of it. Amongst Kate fans, however, "The Dreaming" is generally recognized as her finest work. I truly adore "Hounds of Love" and it is the album I can identify and relate to the most, but if I had to pick only one album to listen to for the rest of my days, "The Dreaming" would be it.

I like Tori Amos, I enjoy P.J. Harvey, I appreciate the enigma that is Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, and I truly am in awe of Lisa Gerrard and her work with Dead Can Dance, but, I must admit, all pale in comparison next to Kate Bush. She remains above everyone else, and I simply cannot imagine my life without her music. Many have likened Kate Bush to god, and I would certainly agree that, yes, she really is.