Bat for Lashes is the Frankenstein of pop music.
By Elise Purdey
The Haunted Man is a gateway album. Natasha Khan’s influences from Portishead, Sinead O’Connor and Kate Bush stand out and, at times, dominate her new Bat For Lashes album.
The many influences overshadowing the unique sound showcased in 2006’s Fur and Gold and 2009’s Two Suns leave no room for stand-out pop tracks like “Daniel” or “What’s A Girl To Do”. Instead, the album can only be fully appreciated as a single unit. Themes of optimism emerge from the dark musical undertone, like in the opening track “Lilies”, the strongest and most poignant song of the album.
The closest Khan comes to a pop song appropriate for the radio is “All Your Gold”, a sinister song about a woman revaluating her passionless relationship. Unfortunately, because of its springy beat it has received comparisons to Gotye’s one-hit wonder, “Somebody That I Used To Know”, which might deter it from the appreciation it deserves. With “Laura”, an apostrophe to a fallen starlet, she seems to return to herself. Khan has perfected this type of piano ballad, which has become her signature style and because of that this track seems to be out of place on The Haunted Man.
This album has the redeeming quality of highlighting her voice’s ethereal character in new ways that her previous albums did not achieve. While the excessive resemblance to Kate Bush and Portishead’s Beth Gibbons brings out a new strength in her voice, it tends to distract from Natasha Khan’s identity as an artist. She also adopts hypnotic chants, building and fading in songs like the celestial “Horses Of The Sun”, which creates the kind of haunting beauty immortalized by Sinead O’Connor. At more obscure moments on the album’s b-side, Khan combines worldly and electronic beats, and simply becomes a more digestible version of Bjork on tracks like “Marilyn”.
Whether or not the album is as strong as its predecessors, her voice performs miracles, bringing each song to another world. This is exemplified by her live performances and surreal, emotionally touching covers of songs. It’s like being visited by a deceased friend in a dream. Khan reacquainted us with massive hits like Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” and The Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of These” and garnered respect from the hard-to-please Radiohead fans when she performed their song “All I Need”.
Khan attempts to revive music styles that died out during the 90s, and consequently this album seems like a Frankenstein creation of all her influences put together. However, no angry villagers will be chasing this away. The album has been subject to severe criticism, not because it lacks quality, but because it fails to fulfill expectations set by fans who were deeply moved by her previous albums. The disappointment is only temporary though, The Haunted Man is more uplifting with each listen, and it becomes easy to float away on the weightlessness of Natasha Khan’s voice.
