The Two of Us
With no small sense of symbolism, the graduating art-school dissertation of Natasha Khan —aka: Miss Bat for Lashes— was on “the artist’s preoccupation with childhood and the subconscious.” Fueled by a fanciful imagination and vivid dreams, Khan's own art fits that bill. And it does so with more of a painful naïveté than a scholastic drive.
For all her frocked-up glamour, worldly sophistication, sense of artistic grandeur, and blossoming musical expertise, Khan communicates with the gormless grace of an eager child. Her fruity lyricism, redolent of forests and princesses and unicorns, teeters on the brink between childhood dream-imagery and embarrassing adolescent poetry.
These contradictions, handily enough, perfectly frame her second record, Two Suns, an album devoted to the subject of duality. Once you pick past the LP's more mystical lyrical clangers (“a thousand crystal towers/a thousand emerald cities”; “I’ve seen so many planets dancing”; “I swallowed the sun in your form”; “into the fire of a burning heart’s desire”), Khan’s lyrical study is part exploration of her own contradictions, part break-up record.
She may mix metaphors —there’s two suns, two planets, and two moons— but these two celestial bodies, whatever they be, are the twin bodies of a relationship; sometimes literally laying, side by side, in bed, othertimes communing on some spiritual plane. “The dream of love is a two-hearted dream,” Khan sings, with all earnestness, in "Sleep Alone"; singing it as a lament for a relationship in which only one heart seems truly invested.
Look At it Shine
"Sleep Alone" is symbolic of the musical sea-change that’s swept across Two Suns. Though the album finds Khan again working with David Kosten —though there’re contributions from members of Yeasayer, and a really creepy special-guest-star vocal from the almighty Scott Walker— there’s none of the brittle, woody, forested textures and tones that defined her first record, Fur and Gold.
Here, Khan and Kosten command a bank of synths, and, at times, busy patterns of beats; "Sleep Alone’"s lament set, with somewhat thematic contradiction, against a stomping beat and forceful keyboards.
Khan is clearly, now, a more confident performer —her voice, in particular, now a glorious, gorgeous, sinuous instrument, sounding and resounding over the arrangements— and the songs, save for the lyrics, are generally ‘better’, in the immediacy of melody and their forthright sense of performative theatricality.
Yet, this makes things feel a little too... smooth. Fur and Gold wore its freak-folk feathers with pride: songs cobbled together from autoharp, harp, zither, viola, harmonium, and all kinds of tuned percussion. Exchanging such ad-hoc bric-a-brac for banks of synths and smoothed-over production, Khan has lost all that glorious natural decay; her arrangements no longer summoning fanciful woodland vistas, but well-appointed production studios. In such, Two Suns might turn out to be the album that makes her a genuine pop-star, but it’s no artistic breakout.
Record Label: Astralwerks
Release Date: 7 April 2009
