content: This album always leaves me with mixed feelings. "Running Up That Hill" I find tedious and repetitive (though it's the best song here). The entire first side sounds like an introduction to drum machine programming. To my ears, it gets monotonous. The Big Sky, and to a lesser extent, Cloudbursting suffer from the same drum machine problem. When Kate sings "Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen" I don't believe her, and the delivery isn't ironic either. And what else is there? The second side (The Ninth Wave) is one disaster after another. Waking the Witch has laughable theatrics; the dirges on Hello Earth reek of bored composition from a bad Chant album. The deliberate Irish music injections feel out of place. Kate simply sounds out of energy, out of emotive powers. Her delivery in The Morning Fog is flat as the flat [Hello] Earth. Compared to The Dreaming or Lionheart or The Kick Inside, this album sounds bored, whiny...and not fun...and not interesting.