- Label
- EMI
- Release date
- 6th April 2009
- Genre
- Indie
- Buy this album
- Order CD
Dream-pop auteur takes musical quantum leap
Natasha Khan’s debut album as Bat For Lashes, 2006’s Fur & Gold, frustrated as much as it thrilled. The precocious Khan was clearly a fledgling talent, but her whimsical flurries of zither and harpsichord and poetic parables of witches and warlocks lacked a central cohesion and propulsion. The ideas were audacious but the songs failed to support them.
Two Suns is also a compulsively ambitious proposition – Khan introduces an alter ego, a “self-absorbed blonde femme fatale” named Pearl – but it also throbs with glowing melodies, spectral harmonies and tunes to die for.
The echo-heavy lament Daniel has the lustrous sheen of Fleetwood Mac, Pearl’s Dream could be Kate Bush at her most magisterially enigmatic, and Khan’s esoteric inclinations don’t prevent Glass and the Scott Walker duet The Big Sleep being crystalline, classy pop songs.
It’s a fine record – and you sense she is just beginning.
More to try:
Kate Bush: The Dreaming
Björk: Vespertine
Clannad: Macalla
