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If Kate Bush started her career in 1999 instead of 1979, I think I know who she may resemble creatively.

Shiina Ringo.

And if studio technology back in 1985 were as advanced as it is today, Hounds of Love could have sounded more like Shooso Strip. (I’m not sure Bush is opulent enough to strive for the level of Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana.)

Although the analog synthesizers of the mid-’80s sound quaint today, there’s no denying the dramatic flair of Hounds of Love.

The album is divided into two sections — “The Hounds of Love” and “The Ninth Wave”.

It’s “The Ninth Wave” on which Bush takes off. “Jig of Life” demonstrates her aptitude with Celtic influences, while the male chorus on “Hello Earth” is some of her eeriest writing ever.

“Waking the Witch”, though, is plenty weird enough for the entire album. A painstakingly rendered montage of growling voices, ominous timbres and Bush’s remarkable wail, the song is pure theatrics. And it’s thrilling.

Threaded together by the image of a “little light”, the seven tracks which make “The Ninth Wave” form a loose narrative. It’s the kind of ambition women songwriters rarely attempt today.

Ringo-chan comes close, but even her most lush machinations don’t quite reach Bush’s unself-conscious conceptual scope. When Kate Bush took risks, she really didn’t hold back.

The first half of the album — “The Hounds of Love” — comes across more conventionally. It starts off with Bush’s most successful single in the US, “Running Up That Hill”, which is actually pretty unremarkable compared to the following tracks.

The album’s title track combines tribal rhythms with a string orchestra, while “Cloudbursting” is some of Bush’s best hook-writing. In many ways, it’s a better single than “Running Up That Hill”.

Despite the technical limitations of the time — and man, I wish I could have listened to the 1997 remastered version instead — Hounds of Love feels a lot larger than it sounds.

Bush’s unabashed performance and the attention to detail she lavishes on this music gives it a sense of timelessness. Even after 20 years, Hounds of Love is still a discovery.

A number of vectors converged to make “Wuthering Heights” the successful song it is.

The music itself is a solid foundation — melodic, dramatic, seemingly simple but ultimately complex. From the odd piano riff in between verses to the chorus that doesn’t quite mark a straight meter, the song is catchy for its quirks.

Then there’s the subject matter — Wuthering Heights, a classic literary novel dramatized in a song every bit as sweeping as the story itself. Cathy’s haunting of Heathcliff encapsulated the central conflict of the story, and the song plumbed the depths of that torment.

Finally, there’s the performance of the song’s creator — Kate Bush. Her pouty voice is at once fragile and overwhelming. “Oh! Let me have it,” Bush wails with an emotional nakedness that’s as frightening as it is alluring.

“Wuthering Heights” demands the attention of everyone who comes in contact with it. Even Antwan “Big Boi” Patton, the member of Outkast not described as flamboyant, cites “Wuthering Heights” as an influence. (So much so, he’s seeking Bush out for a collaboration.)

It’s a song even Bush herself can’t put a chink in its armor, despite her attempt to do so on The Whole Story.

For this inaccurately-named retrospective — Bush would go on to record two more albums before retreating from public life — she re-recorded “Wuthering Heights” to exploit the state of the art in recording technology at the time.

She sounds like she’s singing in a fish bowl.

By then, it had been seven years since “Wuthering Heights” catapulted Bush into stardom in her native England. She was 19 years old when she recorded her debut album, The Kick Inside.

Her updated performance of “Wuthering Heights”, while amping up the bombast, sported a matured voice, able to occupy the nooks and crannies of every sonic surface.

Whether such pigeon-holeing is good or bad, “Wuthering Heights” encapsulates the essence of Kate Bush in the same way her song captured the heart of its namesake novel.

But as the title of the retrospective album indicates, it’s not the whole story.

Instead of following a chronological sequence, The Whole Story jumbles up the different eras of Bush’s work. Her earliest recordings were lush and intimate, strings and piano complimenting a standard rock band.

But as MIDI made studio work more efficient in the ’80s, Bush exploited the technology to transform her music.

It’s tough to resolve the genteel beauty of “The Man with a Child in His Eyes” with the tribal, robotic rhythms of “Sat In Your Lap”. Or that “Cloudbursting” is one of her most orchestral pieces, even though it doesn’t use an orchestra. Or that “Wow” is one of her most etheral songs but keeps the synthesizers at a minimum.

In the framework of The Whole Story, it makes sense. The eclecticism of Bush’s writing threads all the songs together. She may be an incredible melodicist, but try singing along with her, and it becomes apparent how difficult her music can be.

Women singer-songwriters of the past two decades have all been traced back to Kate Bush. From Sinéad O’Connor to Sarah McLachlan, Bush is the litmus strip by which others are compared.

And it’s inaccurate.

Bush infused her music with theatrical imagery. While the songwriters in her wake talked about matters of their hearts, Bush explored her imagination. Who else could sing about a nuclear holocaust as a haunting ballad (“Breathing”)?

It’s that distinctiveness that comes through The Whole Story and makes it a nice entry into Kate Bush’s creative universe.

This album was my first formal introduction to Kate Bush.

(I had heard “Running Up That Hill a few years before, but at the time, I didn’t know it was a Kate Bush song.)

A magazine I read religiously in 1989 featured Bush on its cover and lavished near-religious devotion to her in the article.

Back then, I was a teenager discovering the wide world of music. Sinéad O’Connor, whom I discovered a year before, was compared to Bush, so I figured I may as well see if the parallels were warranted.

They weren’t.

O’Connor was fierce and honest. Bush, on the other hand, was wispy and fragile. She was feminine, whereas O’Connor’s shaved head and confrontation style was more masculine.

The Sensual World wasn’t a first good impression. In fact, I fell asleep half-way through side one.

Then I discovered the trick to listening to it — start with side two. In CD terms, that meant starting with “Deeper Understanding”, an eeriely prophetic song about finding human intimacy through a computer.

At the time, the Internet was solely the domain of goverment agencies and higher education institutions, so online dating wasn’t even a blip in public consciousness. But Bush’s words ring far truer now than they did in 1989.

“As the people here grow colder/I turn to my computer/And spend my evenings with it like a friend,” she sings.

Later in the song, she describes what would eventually called Internet addiction: “Well I’ve never felt such pleasure/Nothing else seemed to matter/I neglected my bodily needs”.

The second half of The Sensual World featured Trio Bulgarka, an offshoot of the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Women’s Choir which stormed the world with its debut album, Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares. The choir would eventually rename itself after the album.

Trio Bulgarka’s backing vocals, mixed with Bush’s lush electronics and Celtic instrumentation, offered more compelling material than the tepid first half.

“Never Be Mine” weaves Uillean pipes with Bulgarka’s plaintive singing. “Rocket’s Tail” starts off with Bush and the trio unaccompanied for the first half of the song, till the rest of the band crashes in for a rousing conclusion.

And of course, “This Woman’s Work”, one of Bush’s best songs, rounds out the album. (Japanese singer ACO blows Maxwell out of the water with her rendition of this song.)

Rewind to the start of the album, and the title track offers Bush punctuating her take on James Joyce’s Ulysses with an erotic, “Mmmm, yes”. And with a giant stretch of the imagination, “Love and Anger” could be construed as a theme song for any gay person coming out.

“It lay buried deep, it lay deep inside me/It’s so deep I don’t think that I can/Speak about it”. Maybe not that giant a stretch.

Although rich and (as the title indicates) sensual, The Sensual World isn’t Bush’s most compelling work. Aside from “This Woman’s Work”, little on the album matches the intensity of “Wuthering Heights” or the eclectism of “Hounds of Love”.

And it’s an album that demands a lot of patience. But that patience pays off.

Just don’t start your exploration of Bush’s work with The Sensual World.