This album is pop in its lush production and Bush’s ecstatic command as a singer, a swaying queen. But she can also do the strange, disembodied storyteller from behind the wind’s walls. Everything is huge, conceptual, and utterly, sickeningly expansive. It may be a product, but its boundless, effortless sound sends it above itself. I find myself incredulous at its goodness. 

“Running Up That Hill” and “Hounds of Love” are a one-two punch of sweeping beauty, seismic turns and exhalations. The former’s perfect chorus can hardly be held back as Bush longs for power in an oppressive relationship. The latter creates a dust-shattering upfulness (it’s the kind of thing that truly, if for just a minute, replaces malaise), expanding on eager strings and vocals happily swinging around while she begs for help with her emotional growth. I can’t do Bush’s winding performances much justice as she digs in. 

“The Big Sky” runs with this riff and soars, entirely unburdened and shooting off into choral soul swells and topped with a post-punk freakout. But the track is most successful maybe in carrying its image, wherein a neglected lover gazes at infinite possibilities and at one especially rapturous moment tunes out the emotionally bankrupt person holding her back: “What was the question? I was looking at the big sky.” “Cloudbusting” matches it with its telling of the plight of psychoanalyst figure Wilhelm Reich, concentrating an impression of his ambition as an opener of clouds into the workings of a house music queen, even as violins work out organic sublimity: “Every time it rains/ you’re here in my head.” 

These tracks duly represent Bush’s artistic command, her ability to write songs that are held down by nothing, where in fact her preoccupations with iterations of love good and bad are just an aspect of her gale force. And so they open an odyssey of powerful concepts. There the time she gives into weakness on “And Dream of Sheep.” “Watching You Without Me” is too close to home (there’s a sense that

No feelings are off limits) and represents one of the album’s greatest tricks: pulling out eruptions of latent, wordless beauty. This happens on “Hello Earth” as a kind of environmental refrain to a guttural chorus on an ancient spaceship. 

Thankfully Bush has crystallized these encompassing scenes.