A winter wonderland

The timing of the release of “50 Words for Snow,” the latest album by English art-rock stalwart Kate Bush, is rather convenient. Not only is it a brilliant album coming out dangerously close to year-end critics’ list season, it’s also the purest possible evocation of the winter months shy of full-on Christmas music. This woman shoots straight for the heart.

Bush has spent much of her career in the shadow of her contemporaries. After scoring her lone No. 1 hit at the age of 19 with 1978’s blustery “Wuthering Heights,” the singer has toiled in relative obscurity, especially stateside. But after nearly a decade of silence from fellow scene luminaries David Bowie and Peter Gabriel, “50 Words for Snow” marks Bush’s time to shine alone. With seven sprawling tracks that rival the best material of her early classics, she has stumbled upon a late-career masterpiece.

The songs are at their best when Bush invites someone along for the ride. On the gorgeous opening track, “Snowflake,” her 13-year-old son contributes soaring soprano notes reminiscent of the ones that made his mom famous.

On “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” Elton John plays the role of Bush’s lover as the two are heartbreakingly reincarnated together during the fall of Rome, World War II and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The title track sees comedian Stephen Fry dryly sharing his anglicized take on that famed Inuit vocabulary.

The lyrics are unabashedly on-the-nose — “Misty” is a song about making love to a snowman and waking up to find she “Can’t find him/The sheets are soaking” — but they mostly work. Bush has always been a storyteller, and more than 30 years of songwriting has taught her precisely how to make even a first-person account of a snowflake falling from a cloud, a sympathetic voice on a hunt for the Abominable Snowman, and, yes, snowman sex, work for her.

That the average song length on the record is nearly 10 minutes is hardly a demerit. “50 Words for Snow” is the sound of Kate Bush breaking out of the constraints of the pop song format, running headlong from convention like the yeti protagonist of “Wild Man” runs from his assailants.

Quite fittingly, the album is an icy breath of fresh air.