Once there was a little girl, and the little girl was only small, but her eyes were big and her ears were keen, and her wit was quick. She stayed in the library room of her house, and she read many books, and she heard voices in the books speaking to her, and this isn’t supposed to happen, but she wasn’t scared.

This little girl also went out in the woods around her house all alone, and she wasn’t supposed to do this, but she was fearless and she did it anyway. In the woods she found wild and lonely places where the old Cairns stood, and there wasn’t anyone there, not even small animals, only herself, and the Cairns, and the wind, and she heard voices in the wild and lonely places, speaking to her. And she wasn’t scared, and she listened.

The little girl grew up to become a great and famous wizard and many people listened to what she said, and she said what she had learnt from the old books and the wild places, but in new ways so that people could understand, if only a little.

These messages, other people picked up and they said them in their own voices, and sometimes they became something different because these people, they knew other things, but you could always tell when the people who picked them up had understood what she meant because they didn’t sound scared even though she was such a great and famous wizard, and she was speaking to them in a clear and pretty voice.

And this proves how true were the old names of the things she had learned in her books, and in her lonely errands into the wild woods.

We warned you about Railcars’ plan to cover Kate Bush’s legendary and incandescent and totemic Hounds of Love album some time ago. Well, the time is now, and the album is here (and here), and we have listened to it and it’s a thing which is strange, and heartfelt, and weirdly beautiful in the way in which the original is, but at the same time, very different. And this is a good thing, for what would the point otherwise?

Railcars – The big sky

Watch Kate’s mighty African steed gallop through the grid of Motown acid and jagged megalithic pop that Aria has meshed, to soar up and burning Pegasus-phoenix-like into the sky, crash through it and beyond, leaving us earthbound and cowering under a deluge of heavenly fragments, the source of that gigantic drone with which the song closes.

(This one was on co-op mode with Altered Zones)

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with covers of excellence