Kate Bush: Aerial

Herald rating: ****

Pleasingly perplexing return of the reclusive English singer-songwriter 12 years since her last album and 27 since Wuthering Heights first spooked the charts.

There are two words among the details of Kate Bush's double album that might perplex many.

They are not "Citizen Kane" which Bush - in a voice much less affected than in her younger years - alludes to in the first single King of the Mountain. It's actually about Elvis and sounds, neatly, a little like Prince's Sign O' The Times (which is not unusual as they once collaborated without leaving their studio boltholes).

Those two words are not "washing machine" a phrase which makes up the hook in the chorus to Mrs Batolozzi, a strangely sexy ode to domestic bliss and reliable whiteware.

And they are not "Goodnight, Mum" which Bush's young son Bertie whispers at the end of Somewhere in Between.

Bertie - apparently one of the reasons Bush has decided to take her own good time since delivering 1992's The Red Shoes - gets his own song. It's called Bertie. His enchanted mum sings it over a harpsichord and a medieval string arrangement.

Yes, it's a little twee and musically odd, especially when Joanni - three songs later - is about medieval heroine Joan of Arc from the point of view of one of her troops against music that is decidedly late 20th century.

Anyway, those two words?

Rolf Harris.

Yes, the ancient Aussie king of the wobbleboard not only offers didgeridoo somewhere on the double album's 14 tracks - he did the same on Bush's The Dreaming in 1982 - he's also got a spoken word part in The Painter's Link.

It's certainly disconcerting to hear his familiar tones emerge early in the second disc, 42-minute nine-track a-day-in-the-life song cycle titled A Sky of Honey.

But, as with most everything else Bush throws into the sometimes baffling mix, Rolf's cameo works.

It's fitting too because A Sky of Honey certainly uses its own broad-bush.

As it shifts from from dawn to dusk and into the next day it segues from pastoral piano moods, flamenco-funk, and rock.

Its highlight Nocturn with its tales of splashing about in the dark somewhere warm suggests Massive Attack fronted by a mermaid.

It does have a thing for frequent birdsong which can make you wonder if Bush spent those intervening years chasing flocks across the moors with a microphone - on the aforementioned Somewhere in Between she seems to have captured the call of the lesser spotted Bjork. But its entrancing and so too is most of the seven-track first disc A Sky of Honey.

As well as pondering the downfall of The King, her devotion to her son, and the spin cycle of life, Bush also contemplates Pi to many recurring decimal places. And she conjures-up a spell on How to Be Invisible ("Eye of braille, hem of anorak, stem of wallflower, hair of doormat ... ") which is this Kate Bush album's most Kate Bush moment and all the more strange and sensual for it. Some of it does seem a little dated - its percussive textures, guitar sounds and fretless basses sounding as it they belong to an 80s heyday of Bush's old mate Peter Gabriel and the like.

But hey, she doesn't get out much. And whatever half of Aerial is approached first - and even with Rolf Harris crashing the party - it offers equal parts beauty and bewilderment.

Label: EMI