Kate Bush

The Red Shoes is the seventh studio album by English musician Kate Bush. Released on 2 November 1993, it was accompanied by Bush's short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, and was her last album before taking a 12-year hiatus. The album peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart and has been certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry. In the United States, the album reached number 28 on the Billboard 200, her highest-peaking album on the chart to date.

Kate Bush's first album, The Kick Inside, released when the singer/songwriter was only 19 years old (but featuring some songs written at 15 and recorded at 16), is her most unabashedly romantic, the sound of an impressionable and highly precocious teenager spreading her wings for the first time. The centerpiece is "Wuthering Heights," which was a hit everywhere except the United States (and propelled the Emily Brontë novel back onto the best-seller lists in England), but there is a lot else here to enjoy: The disturbing "Man with the Child in His Eyes," the catchy rocker "James and the Cold Gun," and "Feel It," an early manifestation of Bush's explorations of sexual experience in song, which would culminate with "Hounds of Love." As those familiar with the latter well know, she would do better work in the future, but this is still a mightily impressive debut.

Never for Ever has Kate Bush sounding vocally stable and more confident, taking what she had put into her debut single "Wuthering Heights" from 1978 and administering those facets into most of the album's content. Never for Ever went to number one in the U.K., on the strength of three singles that made her country's Top 20. Both "Breathing" and "Army Dreamers" went to number 16, while "Babooshka" was her first Top Five single since "Wuthering Heights." Bush's dramatics and theatrical approach to singing begin to solidify on Never for Ever, and her style brandishes avid seriousness without sounding flighty or absurd. "Breathing," about the repercussions of nuclear war, conveys enough passion and vocal curvatures to make her concern sound convincing, while "Army Dreamers" bounces her voice up and down without getting out of hand…

One of two paired box sets chronicling the entirety of Kate Bush's recorded work as of 2018, Remastered, Vol. 2 features upgrades of the three albums since 2005: Aerial, Director's Cut, and 50 Words for Snow. In addition to these records, Remastered, Vol. 2 contains four CDs of non-album tracks, featuring a disc of 12" mixes, two discs of B-sides (labeled "The Other Side"), and a disc of covers (called "In Others' Words"). For the diehards, having these rarities on a proper album is reason enough to acquire Remastered, Vol. 2, and they do elevate a box that doesn't have as many classics as the first box: the 2005 comeback Aerial is teamed with an album where she revisits her past and the lush orchestral 50 Words for Snow. Like its cousin, Remastered, Vol. 2 boasts clean, detailed remasters that feel fuller than their predecessors. That's appropriate for music as sumptuous and transporting as this; the improved fidelity has the effect of making the music seem more vivid, not less.