I accidentally made pepper spray while cooking yesterday, which was weird…

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[5.25]

Anthony Easton: When all these English singers in the last decade or so came out trying to be Kate Bush, I kept saying to myself, the original was better then the copies. Now I’m not so sure.
[5]

Alfred Soto: One of The Sensual World‘s more famous album tracks (Prince acknowledged it in “My Computer”) gets a redundant update, complete with vocoder distortions that would embarrass T-Pain. Its title is a glum irony.
[4]

Doug Robertson: You know when your parents start talking about using “The Google” and try and add you as a friend on Facebook? This is basically that, but set to music.
[5]

Jer Fairall: About 5 years too late for the whole Imogen Heap vocoder trick to have any novelty value, and about 10-15 years too late for the whole blurring of virtual and actual reality scenario to carry much weight. Then I find out this is actually an extended/modified version of a song from 1989, which actually puts her way ahead of the curve, but which cannot, I’m afraid, keep this song from still sounding a little too quaint and a bit too much like old news to me.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: All points here count strictly for the original song, but it’s not for the reason you think. Anyone whining that ONOEZ KATE BUSH HAS SUCCUMBED TO AUTOTUNE! has clearly either forgotten The Dreaming — were autotune available along with Bush’s Fairlight, you know she’d have used it on “All The Love” or “Leave It Open” at least — or has constructed a false image of Bush as an ethereal goddess-weirdo-recluse suspended in Gaffa and gossamer and Cathy Earnshaw’s tears. This dodges the real problem. The original “Deeper Understanding” chorus was huge: a multitracked, seductive Pandora’s boxful of sound, as if all the lonely, far-flung kindred spirits of the world were embracing you, facilitated by and possessed by one little black box. Replacing this with one tiny, tinny robovoice destroys that feeling. It’s as if you’re watching this scene not through the speaker’s eyes but from outside, seeing only a woman crumpled over a DOS terminal, and what used to be a haunting, paradoxical love story becomes something merely small and sad.
[7]

John Seroff: An excellent companion piece to Lil B’s “Age of Information”, “Deeper Understanding” is an all-too-dead-on prog lullaby for 4channers, a cautionary tale of getting one’s neck caught in the fiber optic umbilicus. Who among us doesn’t recognize Bush’s pained mumble of “too much” from the little black box: too much profundity, too much gibberish, too much experience and loss without leaving your seat, too much perfect explanation and unstoppable input. “Deeper”‘s Peter Gabrielesque susurrus, the too steady metronome drumming and infrequent digital yawps eerily echo the pathetic drip of latenight web surfing. This is a song as entrancing and compulsive as any other bad habit, beautifully executed and deceptively enthralling.
[9]

Ian Mathers: I love Kate Bush, but this is not a song that needed to be remade, any more than Hackers need to be remade. And even if it did, increasing the vocal distortion to make it sound even more like, err, a computer (I guess?) was not what needed to be done here.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: I don’t know the original at all, but this feels, even at its most modern chop-and-screw, like a meditation on obsolete technology, something not far from what Laurie Anderson might have been thinking in the age of Atari. The extended, directionless outro, with its hopelessly analog harmonica shuffle, doesn’t help matters: after all these years, what Kate Bush has really wanted to do was jam?
[5]