Kate Bush's King of the Mountain Eats the Music

It's just one track, the first single from Kate Bush's new album. It's called King of the Mountain. The first pass is "well it sure sounds like Kate Bush" and that has its own reassurance. But it's not a big sound piece: it's subtle, musically, lyrically.

The video is equally seemingly simple: the video story seems to be of one of Elvis's Vegas white suits searching for Elvis ( i won't spoil the ending) while the song's lyrics ask Elvis about rumours of various Elvis sightings, imagining him as King of the Mountain. There is no major video trickery, just an intriguing use of black and white, shift to color and inexpensive sets and props: Bush dancing with clothing; laundry lines of pegged clothes, reaching out to the suit flying above them. Bush wearing a trench coat and a cheap guitar strapped to her back.

The thing about the piece itself is that it is so subtle. It takes several listens - either with the traditional "play it loud" Bush stereo cranked - or with headphones - to get the quality of both the instrumentation and the variations in the piece itself. Effectively two choruses, and half a dozen variants on the main chorus theme, "the wind it blows / through the house"
- the sense of emptiness or longingness as the wind, investigates what is or is no longer there is an ingenious ingenious counterpoint to the Elvis trope of the second chorus You're King of the Mountatin/You're a happy man. Whose loss vs whose happiness?

The instrumentation again is rich while being held back. A quiet percussive loop - is it foot steps? rain? - plays through the track. When the bass and drums come in, they sound like they're played by real human musicians; the layered vocals carry through the feel of the wind blowing (in harmony), yearning.

If this is just the first track of an album that's been more than a decade in the making, this last week before Aerial's release is going to be the longest one in 12 years.