Bat for Lashes - Two Suns

Hauntingly beautiful return for Mercury-nominated star

Few artists could open their second album with a biblical passage - the Song of Solomon, in this case - and not risk ridicule and accusations of mass pretension. Bat for Lashes (a.k.a. Natasha Kahn) is, thankfully, one of a very select few who can openly do so. Incidentally, she is also one of a very few women who can pull off the wearing of a gold headband without looking entirely stupid: Danielle Lloyd, take note.

Focussing on the music, though, and following up 2006’s Mercury-nominated, and unjustly beaten, Fur and Gold was never going to be a simple task. Yet with Two Suns, Kahn takes the best elements of her debut offering, does away with its weaknesses (a relatively low longevity), and has crafted a collection of fantastic collection of tracks combining the catchy (‘Daniel’, ‘Sleep Alone’), the slow-burning (‘Siren Song’) and the indescribably beautiful (‘Moon and Moon’). It is, though, opening offering ‘Glass’ which best characterises an album filled with wonderful contradictions. Ethereal, immediate, haunting, exciting, poetic - it is BFL’s finest moment, and a track that should be heard by anyone with a serious interest in the indie scene.

There’s also significant experimentation and progress evident here; the trip-hop heavy ‘Pearl’s Dream’ represents a significant departure from the recognisable BFL sound, delivering a track that retains a recognisable character, but blends it with a fantastically invigorating soul-funk sound, and a chorus which bores straight for the memory banks upon first hearing.

With her second album, Bat for Lashes cements her reputation as Britain’s answer to Tori Amos - that is, the astonishing early-90s Amos, as opposed to the rather uninspired sounding late-‘noughties’ version, but we digress. In much the same way as her sonic predecessor, Kahn produces songs of fantastic depth and beauty, allowing voice and piano to soar far beyond the realms of the ordinary singer-songwriter and approaches genuine, unequivocal musical genius. She is, perhaps, a once-in-a-generation act; she is to be treasured.


C.S.