Woken by a black horse at the window, she is sent on a quest that will decide her fate. This is the dream that came to Pakistan-born, Brighton-based Natasha Khan and became the first song on her striking record, Fur and Gold. “Horse and I” starts out almost imperceptibly with whooshing wind and pattering rain until the harpsichord kicks in; theremins call from the land of spirits and snares snap insistently, while the melancholy-toned Khan recounts her tale as the chosen one. This sort of forest primeval, mystical shadow quality permeates Bat for Lashes’s music, which unsurprisingly fits nighttime hours best.
There are times when both Khan’s voice and her music conjure a stable of notable female singer-songwriters — to mention just a few, there’s the huskiness of Chan Marshall and rawness of PJ Harvey, the harmonizations of Sarah McLachlan, freewheeling melodies of Tori Amos, and off-the-wall sensibility of Björk. And much as the album title implies, the aesthetic of Bat for Lashes involves feathers, headdresses and other magicking accessories. The look, the unavoidable ghosts of female songstress stars plus the unapologetically esoteric, black-and-red spirit might well cause, at first skim, a dismissal of the album as gimmicky and even derivative. But there’s a unique vision supplied here by Khan and an artfulness in her songs’ construction.
Instead of using the gothic atmosphere of Fur and Gold as a blueprint for plodding, monotone effect, Khan and her team (a trio of multi-instrumentalists — Ginger Lee, Abi Fry, Lizzie Carey — and some guest guitar and gravelly vocals by Lift To Experience’s Josh T. Pearson) distinguish themselves by putting together contrasting textures, interesting harmonies enthralling rhythms and sound effects in some great arrangements. There are some beautiful, expressive buildups and layering of sound, as in the ballad “Sad Eyes” or the stark, angular “I Saw a Light.” Whether it’s stomping and clapping, or thrums of an autoharp, the musical elements and echoes of familiar artists cohere to make something new — the songs show range while retaining an identifiable “Bat for Lashes” quality. This is part of why this album stands out and why the bonus track, a lovely plaintive ballad cover of Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire,” works. The piano and keyboard work, much of it supplied by Khan, is some of the most effective I’ve heard in a band, not exactly innovative but always seeming to fit the moment at hand.
What uplifts the music from the doom and gloom base is its catchiness, especially in the bass lines and beats, and how Khan often plays off them with her melodies. In general, there’s a sense of fun derived from self-indulgent melodrama, akin to how one can look at brooding, door-slamming teenage years from a distance and laugh. There’s definitely some of that in “What’s A Girl To Do?” with Halloween-y organs, utterly sing-along-able chorus and rather irresistible “boom-ba-boom BOOM!” drum intro commonly quoted from the Ronette’s “Be My Baby,” here with the shoegazer sound of Jesus and Mary Chain’s intro to “Just Like Honey.”
The minus here has to be the lyrics. Khan might have done an incredible job of capturing her grim fairytale world in music and mood, but the lyrics are like when you’re trying to tell a friend about this weird, incredible dream you had but your words are falling utterly short in conveying that exact feeling (and your friend doesn’t really care to hear about it anyway). Singing along to “What’s A Girl To Do?” you might stop short to question, “What is she saying? When your dreams are on the train to train wreck town? Seriously?” Luckily, the music is often powerful enough to make up for that certain lack of eloquence and some unfortunate rhymes, as in “The Wizard,” a great but unsolvable song. That still doesn’t help the sense that you get that Khan’s inspiration ran out when it came to the verbal portion of the evening. Album standouts like “Horse and I,” the evocative, emotional “Bat’s Mouth” and creepy “Sarah,” though, come off well, seeming to have a more fleshed-out picture or story behind it.
Though her own listening tastes lean towards Neil Young, Lou Reed, and Springsteen, Khan leads her all-women group in songs that often inhabit a female perspective. Her mixture of dreams, innocence and darker matters — and perhaps identification as a child of the ‘80s — is a refreshing take on a genre more commonly found in literature and movies than pop music alone. The result is that it’s no surprise that Fur and Gold has gotten stamps of approval from musicians like Bjork, Devendra Banhart and Thom Yorke and was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize this year. Khan is an artist to watch.
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