Bat For Lashes: The Bride

BAT FOR LASHES: THE BRIDE (2016)

1) I Do; 2) Joe's Dream; 3) In God's House; 4) Honeymooning Alone; 5) Sunday Love; 6) Never Forgive The Angels; 7) Close Encounters; 8) Widow's Peak; 9) Land's End; 10) If I Knew; 11) I Will Love Again; 12) In Your Bed.

Leave it to Natasha Khan, the illegitimate offspring of a biology-defying union between Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks, to put out a concept album about breaking down when most of her singer-songwriter colleagues prefer those about breaking up. Other ladies get their imaginary (or, sometimes, real) boyfriends to dump them and feed on their imaginary (or real) pain for artistry; the fourth album of Bat For Lashes invents a story about the boyfriend actually dying on the way to the (imaginary) wedding, and the girlfriend still seeing herself as betrothed to his spirit.

There's a Tim Burton movie in this somewhere, I guess, or at least a soap opera with supernatural elements, but once we've exhausted all the jokes and fired off all the inevitable (and, might I say, perfectly forgivable) cynical / sarcastic remarks, The Bride demands to be taken seriously — un­like, say, a 100% cybernetic market creation like Lana Del "A Spanish Name Sound So Fuckin' Cool" Rey, Natasha Khan had always had that Stevie Nicks ability of combining romantic artistic clichés with a trust-drawing attitude. Here, she has written herself a personal tragedy and cast herself as the protagonist, and dealing on a yes-or-no basis, I must state, first and foremost, that it works, and everything else is ultimately negligible from that perspective.

Since time seems to have gruesomely slowed down lately, I should probably remind all of us, myself included, that it's been a whoppin' ten years now since her first album (more than the en­tire recorded career of The Beatles, right?), and while we rarely expect now to see any significant artistic progression in that interim, we might at least expect maturity — meaning that some of the critical remarks about the album being too slow, too moody, too hookless when compared with the sprightlier, boppier singles from Fur And Gold (aye, remember the jumping rabbit-headed bicyclists in ʽWhat's A Girl To Doʼ?), just refuse to take into account the fact that she is, like, 37 years old now; she can certainly allow a little moodiness. And yes, the hooks take a while to sink in, but three or four listens into the record, I have to admit it's a worthy while.

As usual, she relishes in her role of multi-instrumentalist here, with five or six additional musici­ans enlisted for support but not completely replacing her on any of the instruments — guitars, keyboards, vibraphone, celesta, bass, drums, you name it (Ben Christophers does handle most of the bass parts, though, and then there's like five or six different co-producers to prevent it all from going too sloppy). Since she is not a virtuoso on any of those instruments, clearly, it's all going to be relatively slow and technically simple — but she has worked out a knack for emotionally grappling combinations of sounds, and continues to stay in top vocal form. Electronic and acous­tic instruments are combined near-perfectly and used when and where the song's mood / purpose really calls for them (and when it calls for something grander, she does not mind going all the way and commissioning a string orchestra, e. g. ʽClose Encountersʼ); I don't seem to recall being irritated by any of the textures on even one of the songs — and for all of the album's slowness, these textures are remarkably diverse, with guitars, pianos, electronics, strings, bass, etc., domi­nating in succession, so that, despite the thematic unity, each track has its own face.

And, honestly, much of the record is innocently beautiful, as she manages to find deeply touching vocal moves and pin them on top of those tasteful textures. Even on the brief and somewhat inten­tionally formulaic ʽI Doʼ (a moment of blissfully unaware pre-wedding happiness), she puts some cool happy-sad melismatic touches on the "I do..." bit — and then, starting with ʽJoe's Dreamʼ, when darkness and dread begin to take over, she becomes so engrossed in her own story that it is hard not to be pulled in (I could swear she gives the strongest "cross my heart and hope to die!" delivery I've ever heard). The falsetto singing on ʽSunday Loveʼ, the album's fastest and most (formally) danceable track, ranks up there with the best of Eighties' synth-pop; ʽNever For­give The Angelsʼ is first-rate dark folk with haunting vocal harmony arrangements; and ʽLand's Endʼ, to me, is reminiscent of Tim Buckley's serenades to the sirens — when she hits that chorus, with just a tiny hint of dissonance, we have that «uncomfortable mystery feel» generated in an instant, where, you know, you just have to give a bit of an unpredictable nudge to your romantic flow and divert it into a wholly new direction.

I am not saying that there is some sort of innovative, never-before-witnessed artistic twist here. The story, after all, is not that complex — you get betrothed, you get cheated by Death, you go into shock, you slowly get over it, you finally decide to start your life anew — but then, it might be precisely the natural flow of it all that gives The Bride its charm. There are occasional risks that do not pay off — for instance, I don't know why ʽI Will Love Againʼ needed that lengthy «synth hum over two bass notes» coda; there's a difference between a record depending on ambience and being an ambient record — but then, how long has it been since we last heard a record that took risks and capitalized on all of them? Personally, I am already amazed at the fact that an album with such a concept, recorded by a self-consciously «artsy» UK artist in 2016, does not suck — let alone actually combining pretty vocal melodies with tasteful and diverse arran­gements — so let us not spend time and energy looking for flaws just because the flashing neon sign «This Record Demands To Be Taken Seriously» has got us all riled up.

Overall, while in terms of individual songs it is hard to single out particularly obvious highlights (something that was fairly easy on her first three records), as an album — a conceptual suite at that — The Bride is certainly her finest, most «mature» and «artistically adequate» statement so far, though I am not sure how many people will be willing to identify and empathize with it. Well, I guess if you're a girl and your fiancé happened to die in a car crash on the way to your wedding, you'll be needing this for some much-needed psychotherapy. Otherwise, you'll just have to imagine yourself as a girl whose fiancé happened to die in a car crash on the way to your wed­ding — which is... possible, I guess. Not that hard, really. I did give it a try, and ended up with a solid thumbs up on both of my hands.

Bat For Lashes: The Haunted Man

BAT FOR LASHES: THE HAUNTED MAN (2012)

1) Lilies; 2) All Your Gold; 3) Horses Of The Sun; 4) Oh Yeah; 5) Laura; 6) Winter Fields; 7) The Haunted Man; 8) Marilyn; 9) A Wall; 10) Rest Your Head; 11) Deep Sea Diver.

Well, it looks like nobody was interested in taking my advice and steering The Enchanted Lady of Pakistan in the direction of lighter entertainment. Or, more likely, this is simply an impossible task: The Lady has a will of steel, tempered by everything from severe childhood experiences to a questionable, but firm taste in literature and other forms of art. The Haunted Man — so haunted, in fact, that all he can do now is rest, naked and lifeless, on Mother Natasha's bare shoulders — is the generally predictable third volume of Bat For Lashes' venture into the world of sensual ro­mantic darkness, usually inhabited by pseudo-intellectuals and con people, but sometimes visited by more demanding visitors as well (by mistake or out of curiosity).

On that global level, nothing has changed. Natasha Khan has not improved either as a musician or as a lyricist, and her cherished «artistic vision» has not been expanded from the usual Freu­dian muck. There may be a slightly deeper sexual subtext this time — as she grows older, she gets less shy about letting it out in the open, starting with the provocative album sleeve and ending with tracks like ʽOh Yeahʼ and ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ, particularly the former which really sounds like an invitation to try a new style of lovemaking if you are bored with the traditional stuff. But it is still only part of the story — in her witchy world, sexuality plays an important part, yet you do not reduce everything to sexuality. Or, at least, much of the time you give sexuality another name.

On the local level, however, I was surprised: The Haunted Man is definitely a huge improve­ment over Two Suns in terms of individual song quality — in fact, the lady had my attention hooked for almost the entire first half of the record, letting it drop somewhere around ʽWinter Fieldsʼ but still recapturing it with ʽMarilynʼ and, for a brief while, with ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ. Basi­cally, it all seems like a matter of being able, or unable, to exploit her strongest advantages — a good sense of vocal melody, particularly contrastive vocal melodies, and the skill of com­pen­sa­ting for the technically weak instrumentation with an assortment of «musical knick-knacks». Of course, I have no idea how many of the «knick-knacks» Natasha happens to be personally respon­sible for (there is like a million people altogether working on this record), but, in the end, this is a «Bat For Lashes» album, not a «Natasha Khan» one — and who could properly define «Bat For Lashes» and segregate it into individual components?

The voice power is probably best illustrated with ʽLauraʼ, a sparsely arranged piano-and-subtle-strings ballad that she co-wrote with Justin Parker — the guy who, not coincidentally, was also responsible for introducing Lana Del Rey's ʽVideo Gamesʼ to the world in 2011, and the two songs do have a lot in common (sad piano ballads delivered by femme-fatales with mystical auras and lotsa makeup). But where, as far as my troubled ears are concerned, ʽVideo Gamesʼ remains a puffed-up nothing like 99% representatives of the genre, ʽLauraʼ is a much better song — it rises, it falls, it starts soft, it gets tense, in short, it lives and breathes. It isn't much of an original composition, with verses sounding as if they were appropriated from an old Dylan folk number and the chorus quoting from ʽRemember (Walking In The Sand)ʼ (well, I suppose The Shangri-Las should be quite a natural influence for Natasha), but even the stock phrases are screwed to­gether in a lively way — normally, I'd just walk away from something like this in bored disgust, but here, I thought I felt a real spark. (Oh, and naturally, the video for ʽLauraʼ has 1 million views on YouTube where the one for ʽVideo Gamesʼ has 30 million — but I suppose it all has to do with the seductive wonders of lip enhancement surgery).

Most of the other songs have «deeper» sounds, unfortunately, way too often marred by an un­healthy fascination with drum machines (does she have a Dead Can Dance fetish or what?), but salvaged through great vocal parts — ʽLiliesʼ is a fine example, if you manage to disregard the lyrics (about a magical milkman or something). But she is at her very best here when she opens the tap on the «darkness» barrel — ʽAll Your Goldʼ and ʽHorses Of The Sunʼ (never mind the titles, please!) rank with her very best stuff on the early albums, or maybe even go beyond that level. ʽAll Your Goldʼ, in particular, is a nifty synthesis of a Caribbean bassline, a traditional pop vocal melody, dream-folk harps and chimes, and some grumpy treated guitar chords that seem lifted from some faraway hard rock classic. ʽHorsesʼ is also moderately haunting, mostly thanks to the great idea of singing the verse melody an octave lower than her usual range, which then contrasts with the happy-cloudy psycho-pop chorus in a memorable way.

The «tribal», «voodooistic» aspects of the album that involve round-the-fire male choruses of­fering religious support (ʽOh Yeahʼ; the title track) do not work nearly as well, because Ms. Khan is always at her best when she is alone — it works much better when all these «spirits dancing» remain in her (and your) imagination rather than try and make an effort at materializing in the flesh. But it does not necessarily mean that she always sucks when going for a louder, fuller sound — ʽMarilynʼ and ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ both feature quite beautiful arrangements, even if they are a bit too derivative of all that mid-to-late Eighties New Age scene. Not quite so with ʽA Wallʼ, which was, for some reason, «blessed» with a danceable percussion groove even though the melo­dy itself is anything but catchy.

Cutting this short, The Haunted Man returns me back on the fence about Bat For Lashes, where I'd already thought that Two Suns would forever land me on the negatively charged side of it. I mean, ever since Kate Bush invented this genre, for every person that used it with the properly input mix of intelligence and creativity, there have been ten whose fascination never went beyond silly clichés. With this lady, three albums into her career, it is still hard to tell if she is just a mild­ly talented phoney, or a real prodigy that is too hampered by childhood attractions and genre con­ventions to let her gift shine properly. But there definitely is artistic merit in The Haunted Man, although it sure enough ain't in the sleeve photo. Thumbs up, with caution and patience.

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Bat For Lashes: Two Suns

BAT FOR LASHES: TWO SUNS (2009)

1) Glass; 2) Sleep Alone; 3) Moon And Moon; 4) Daniel; 5) Peace Of Mind; 6) Siren Song; 7) Pearl's Dream; 8) Good Love; 9) Two Planets; 10) Travelling Woman; 11) The Big Sleep.

Fur And Gold was one of those curious debuts that make any attempts at further predictions to­tally futile. It had its moments of beauty mixed with its moments of cringe, and, all over the place, there seemed to be potential waiting to be tapped into. Lyrics too silly? People don't get born as lyricists, they mature. Melodies too simplistic? But it's not the complexity that counts, it's the spi­ritual power. What mattered most was that Fur And Gold was clearly the creation of an easily influenced, but essentially free-wandering spirit. Meaning that Natasha Khan's next move could be just about anything. For all we know, she could start playing minimalistic reworkings of Or­nette Coleman's material, arranged as duets for sitar and washboard.

Alas, Two Suns finds her concentrating on her weakest skill: Artsiness. Almost completely ban­ning tight pop frameworks from sight, she is almost exclusively writing in the «moody» vein now, turning into what some have already christened a «poor man's Björk» — without insinuating that she actually uses the real Björk as a working model, but she aims her ball at more or less the same lane, while scoring — quite predictably — ten times less.

The press release for the album has been quoted by almost every reviewer, because who could stay away from lines like «Two Suns addresses the philosophy of the self and duality, examining the need for both chaos and balance, for both love and pain, in addition to touching on meta­phy­sical ideas concerning the connections between all existence»? There were even some people who took that seriously — the lucky few who survived the reading process — and started discussing the important changes of perspective that aspiring young philosopher Natasha Khan brought into our common understanding of the metaphysical structure of the universe. (Roll over, Kierkegaard, tell Heidegger the news).

The trouble is, we could all just close our eyes on this pseudo-neo-romantic bullshit and enjoy the music — if it weren't for the fact that Bat For Lashes takes it more than just seriously: with each of these songs, she deliberately wedges her hollow messages into your head. Two Suns still shows signs of true talent, but it is betrayed every step of the way, as she hangs it out to dry, neg­lecting music in favour of ridiculously overblown brainwashing.

Crowning it all with her «inven­tion» of an «alter ego» called «Pearl», which the press release describes as «a destructive, self-absorbed, blonde, femme fatale of a persona who acts as a direct foil to Khan's more mystical, desert-born spiritual self». I particularly like that they did not forget to use the word «desert-born» in this context. Doesn't it sound fantastic? Overwhelming? Desert-born! (Then again, I guess if Denmark can be a prison, London — in which she was born — can certainly be a desert).

If you make a really strong effort and manage to completely ignore the lyrics (including the wret­ched press release), some of these tracks may eventually redeem themselves. Unfortunately, this almost never concerns the brooding rhythmless ballads, whose boring piano non-hooks, near-per­manent echoey hoo-hoos and aah-aahs, and occasionally varying background instrumentation never really gel into anything special. But once she drags out the bass, things sometimes change for the better: 'Sleep Alone' is a pretty little nightmare on the border of Middle East muzak and dark disco, the lead single 'Daniel' is no Elton John, but still tolerable, and 'Pearl's Dream' has the catchiest, if a bit annoying, chorus on the entire record.

The jackpot is hit on the last tune, when, out of the shadows, the one and only Scott Walker sud­denly arises to duet with the pretty dualistic girl on 'The Big Sleep'... for about thirty seconds in total, before falling back into slumber (as she says herself, "Not even out of my dress and already my voice is fading"). How on Earth she managed to lure the man, a well-known recluse, into the studio, I don't know and I'm not sure I do want to know, but he does manage, during these thirty seconds, to turn the tables completely and provide the record with a non-fitting conclusion that is, in itself, more or less worth the entire remaining length of Two Suns. But who wants to listen to fourty minutes of bad music for one single magical "How can it be..."?

In short, this is very, very lame. Amazon.com warns you (or, if it doesn't, it should) that if you love this album, you probably enjoy reading Castaneda and Coelho, dressing up as Xena (regard­less of gender), and jumping off twelve-storey buildings during your lunch breaks. If, however, you just love good music, buy this lady a ticket to a Pipettes concert for a cure. Confucius did warn us, after all, that «Thought without learning is perilous», and so is this album — I may res­pect the effort, but if the effort is wasted like that, what can I do? Thumbs down.

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Bat For Lashes: Fur And Gold

BAT FOR LASHES: FUR AND GOLD (2006)

1) Horse And I; 2) Trophy; 3) Tahiti; 4) What's A Girl To Do; 5) Sad Eyes; 6) The Wizard; 7) Prescilla; 8) Bat's Mouth; 9) Seal Jubilee; 10) Sarah; 11) I Saw A Light.

Fur. Gold. Bats. Lashes. Wizards. Coats of armor. A girl called Natasha Khan, born and raised in London, UK. Wearing outfits that are one-third medieval Europe, one-third medieval Middle East, and one-third Narnia. All I can say is — we've come a friggin' long way from the world of ele­men­tary particles, or even prokaryotes.

Approaching this from another end, these days it takes real skill and strength on the part of a young pretty girl to choose her own way when so many not very good people are getting paid to choose it for her. It is obvious that Natasha Khan is not marketed — no sane marketologist would ever want to market her that way — and it is nice to know that this did not stop her from achie­ving not only critical, but also popular success.

It is also reassuring that approximately 40% of the people, upon listening to Fur And Gold, dis­miss or adore her for being a total Björk rip-off, and 40% more condemn or praise her as the la­test in a series of Kate Bush wannabes. The remaining 20% draw comparisons to Tori Amos, Jo­anna Newsom, Sinead O'Connor, Siouxsie Sioux, Imogen Heap, and Fiona Apple; to all of these ladies, digging a little deeper, I could per­sonally add a bit of Grace Slick and a lot of Stevie Nicks. Bottomline: Miss Khan is an autonomous artist in her own right, not capable of coming up with a completely unique, «where-the-hell-did-this-shit-come-from» style — but, in 2006, who in the whole wide world, really is? — but doing the next best thing: adding a drop of her unrepeatable self into a big, boiling synthesis of influences that may reach all the way down to Billie Holiday and Jim Morrison and then stretch all the way up to Radiohead.

Fur And Gold is an odd album, not because it is so self-consciously «odd», but because it's odd that I don't hate it when I'm really supposed to. Natasha can sing — but no better or worse than many other girls, and there are no particularly stunning qualities to her voice. She can play, pre­senting herself as a multi-instrumentalist — but no better or worse than anyone with a musical school degree, and her melodies are competent, but never too complex (she quotes Steve Reich as one of her influences, but something tells me she chooses minimalist patterns for her composi­tions not purely as an artistic choice).

And her fetish? Somber surrealism. The first lines you hear are "Got woken in the night / By a mystic golden light", and it is not going to get much better. The case defines «classic»: bright, in­trovert kid, misunderstood and mistreated by peers (allegedly, she used to skip class all the time because of racist issues connected with her Pakistani heritage), retreating into fantasy worlds for comfort, and now, years later, opening these fantasy worlds up for paying tourists. This is not exactly Dungeons & Dragons, but technically, it's sort of close. Why should anyone be interested in this, except for similar background people — say, teenage girls who want to be «different» from the riff-raff that is perfectly content with Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift?

I don't really know. Possibly because, even though Fur And Gold is almost permanently teete­ring on the verge of Total Crappy Embarrassment, somehow none of the songs ever really get there — there is always some peculiar interesting touch that saves them at the last moment. Also, the lyrics should be totally disregarded. Let us assume they are simply there for the sake of add­ing another instrument, the human voice, and also that Natasha really sings in Urdu, or Quenya, because the moment you start seriously wondering what it is that she is singing about, you are gone, and no ER team is ever going to bring you back. If you really insist, let's assume she is try­ing to remember some of the dreams she had when she was 10 years old.

But, like I said, all, or most of these songs have these neat little flourishes. 'Horse And I', the lead-in track that also explains the album sleeve, in order to be put on record, may not have needed that looping melody to be played on the harpsichord, or the stern martial drum pattern à la Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit', or the mind-fucking vocal overdubs coming from different sides. But when put together, they somehow transcend «creativity for the sake of being creative» — this be­comes a new take on musical mysticism, well worth tasting even on the part of those who'd been following the development of mystical motives in pop ever since the 1960s (not to mention gua­ranteed to blow the roof off those who hadn't, but that sort of goes without saying).

'Trophy' and 'Sarah' (the latter — a concealed bow to Stevie?) redeem themselves with simple, but gritty bass lines that seem as if they'd been extracted from some early heavy metal classics and put to entirely different use in an entirely new musical context. 'What's A Girl To Do' is like The Shangri-Las all over again, arguably the catchiest and simplest of all the songs here, and so innocent and, somehow, unpretentious that hating it would be out of the question. (You might want to turn your nose at the spoken verses stuffed with tragic-romantic clichés, but I do believe she is consciously paying tribute to Mary Weiss and the girls here — if she is not, count me seri­ously disappointed).

Even the lengthy closer 'I Saw A Light', on which she tries to go for a cathartic crescendo, even elevating her voice to screaming levels, is attractive — it certainly does not work the intended way, because her instrumental skills are not enough to create a real «musical orgasm», and her voice only betrays its frailty when she goes for the extra decibels; but the main minimalist melo­dy, be it just four notes, has a strange soothing, comforting quality that you sometimes get from real good ambient albums.

Also, it is not really easy to categorize the record: regardless of how many influences there are, the songs seem to have been written from total scratch, without any particular genre restrictions, in a mode of total freedom. Classical, folk, Motown pop, art-rock, piano balladry, it all stops and starts without warning — all of it raw and somewhat under-experienced, because, for the most part, Khan is there on her own, but so what? It merely adds to the braveness factor.

True, it's often difficult to tell if the created atmosphere is really teeming with spirit or is just a hollow technical creation — especially on all the plodding ballads like 'Seal Jubilee' and 'Sad Eyes'. But perhaps this is exactly where we should leave it at: Fur And Gold is a lightweight mu­sical enigma, an album over the authenticity / fakeness of which one could, if one wanted to, fight a Trojan War and still not even manage to build a proper wooden horse. All I can offer is my jud­gement: not overwhelmed, but intrigued, and for an album with lyrics like those to be even mo­destly intriguing, its creator must be endowed with talent. Blame it on the cynicism and blandness of the times that some creators get a bit too bluntly derailed by superficial fantasy temptations. I move for a forgiving and encouraging thumbs up.

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