i found a book on how to be invisible

Apparently, new music is going to continue to be released in 2006, much as it has for the past several years (and possibly even before that). I wasn't prepared for this; I thought I would have the whole year to talk about stuff I listened to in 2005, but I find myself listening to new releases by, for example, Neko Case, Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, Soft, and the Infadels, and it's clear that I'd better get 2005 thoughts off my chest in a hurry, or soon there will simply be too much to talk about and I will, as a matter of course, physically explode.

And so here starts a series of prattlings on about the things that rattled around in my A-rotation in 2005. Today's installment:



Is it a double album? Is it two separate records released together? No one knows. There are two titles here: Aerial: A Sea of Honey, and Aerial: A Sky of Honey, but the whole thing fits together rather well.

It's been something like 12 years since Kate Bush released her last record (The Red Shoes, poorly received with good reason). But damn if it wasn't worth the wait! Some people are calling this her masterpiece. I hesitate, because her 1989 record The Sensual World is sacred to me, but if a person can have more than one masterpiece, then okay, this one is too.

There's actually a block of three tracks that I would regularly skip when I first started listening, but I've at least gotten used to them in the context of the larger album. They happen early, so it's easy to get past them. It's imperative to get past them, I should say. The first record is a collection of very personal songs in which she evokes her young son's perfect smile, a little brown jug her mother used to have, and Elvis. There are some gems in there, especially in the last track of the record, "A Coral Room".

But it's the second disc, Aerial: A Sky of Honey, that grabs me and won't let go. It's a concept album, in many ways very reminiscent of the second half of Hounds of Love but even better. The kind of record where if I hear one song on shuffle, I rearrange things so I can listen to the rest of the album.

A friend recently asked me what my favorite album of 2005 was, and I haven't been able to nail down an album-of-the-year, but this is the first one that comes to mind when I consider the possibilities, so that's something.

One extra-annoying thing about getting the album: It was released in the UK and the US at the same time, but the US iTunes Music Store doesn't carry it. And, of course, if you live in the US you can't buy from the UK iTunes Music Store, which is infinitely frustrating and stupid (they could even jack up the price as an import fee or something, I'm sure we wouldn't mind), so I had to actually go to a music store and buy the hardcopy of the CD, something I haven't done in a long time. And now I have this CD sitting around, just what the hell am I supposed to do with it? I'm not equipped for this kind of thing anymore!