Director's Cut

'Six years have gone since Aerial, her last, double album; before that, 12 years went by with barely an aerated hiccup. Bush makes you wait, and nothing is more tantalising in an age of instant-everything-on-demand than not hearing from an adored artist. Bush has not toured since 1979, an artistic quirk that has some bearing on Director's Cut.

Only a nerd of the deepest hue would bother to painstakingly transpose her 1993 album, The Red Shoes, from its digitally produced final cut into analogue tracks, held by many audiophiles to be 'warmer'-sounding. This is precisely what Bush has done on Director's Cut. The album takes great swathes of The Red Shoes and choice cuts from its predecessor, 1989's The Sensual World, and reworks them, sometimes with subtlety, and sometimes with daring.

Throughout, Bush's youthful gasps have gone, replaced by the purr of an older woman. What the songs have lost in urgency they have gained in calm, not always for the better. One of Bush's most sacred texts, 'This Woman's Work', will be Bush's most controversial reinterpretation. It's bare, orchestrated with bell-like keys and a little thrum that pans between headphones so as to make you dizzy. Her new vocal is magical, but where once the whole track reverberated with emotion, there is now a wafty ambient tonality reminiscent of new age treatment rooms. Director's Cut finds Bush satisfying her own internal urge to mend rather than make do. And while most of us may find such obsessive revisionism baffling, it still makes for a beguiling album.' – The Guardian UK