Albums : Bat For Lashes : The Haunted Man

Albums : Bat For Lashes : The Haunted Man

Listen To Bat For Lashes : The Haunted Man

Who Is Bat For Lashes?
Album number three. In the trajectory of any recording career, it’s a milestone. But it’s one with a mythology so powerful it’s become a syndromic cliché, around which swirls a dread that threatens to swallow its (supposedly) panicking creator. For plenty of artists, the “difficult third album” can loom like a hurdle of K2-scaled monumentality. How the hell might you tackle it, is the question. The answer, if you’re Bat for Lashes, is you simply climb higher and through that, conquer your fears.

The creation of Natasha Khan, Bat for Lashes first captured hearts way back in 2006 with a set of distinctively haunting and rich, darkly phantasmagoric songs ripe with magic realism. Her sensual and gilt-decorated dream world was opened up in two Mercury Music Prize nominated albums, the atavistic, reverb-drenched Fur and Gold (2006) and 2009’s more electronically poppy Two Suns. The latter featured the irresistible Daniel – which won Ms Khan an Ivor Novello award for Best Contemporary Song – and was recorded in London and across America.

In the wake of its success, Khan was left in a migratory, unfixed state and a not altogether certain frame of mind. Coming off a heavy tour and after the end of a trans-Atlantic relationship, she decided some self-nurturing was in order and resolved to take as much time as was needed to make her third album. “I felt quite drained and tired, creatively,” Khan remembers, “so I decided to get back to this really domesticated existence in my flat in Brighton. I felt like I needed to be immersed in nature and have a quiet, reflective time.” That involved working on dance films, writing a script, children’s book illustrations, a spell of volunteer gardening at Charleston House in East Sussex (the Bloomsbury Group’s country retreat) and going back to Brighton University for some informal tutorials with her old art teacher and reading recommended books. One of these, ‘The Enchantment of Art’ provided a small epiphany and planted a seed of change in her approach to what was to become The Haunted Man.

“I found it interesting,” she says of the book, “because I’d felt quite disenchanted myself and needed to find the magic again. It’s about how modernism is all to do with the individual, and the fact that your worth is measured in how different and inventive you can be. The more we get into post-modernism, the harder it is to feel that you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. I was trying to navigate fresh waters and find something new to say with the third record, and a lot of the book talks about getting back to nature sacred spaces and about communal, collaborative activities.” (Read More)

The Haunted Man Review
Natasha Khan has said her third album as Bat for Lashes is partly inspired by studying her own family history. This is informative. Her father, a trainer for the Pakistani national squash team, left suddenly when she was 11, and his departure casts a shadow on the fairytale drama of Bat for Lashes' debut, 2006's Fur and Gold. Yeah, but one of the guys Khan's dad coached? Her cousin, Jahangir Khan? He went on to become a six-time world champion and basically his sport's equivalent of a Pelé or Michael Jordan. You don't need Natasha's Ancestry.com password to know there's competitive drive in her blood.

That's her up there in The Haunted Man cover art. Naked, un-retouched, and un-made-up, with a similarly naked man draped around her shoulders. The suggestion is that her follow-up to 2009's lavishly sensual Two Suns is more intimate and stripped bare, and sure enough, there's less reverb on Khan's voice, and the lyrical concerns have moved from an otherworldly New York to the English countryside. But what the Ryan McGinley-shot art most closely shares with the music you'll find within is that it's at once striking and enigmatic-- and artfully constructed.

Some albums sound effortless. The Haunted Man sounds like effort magnificently realized. The rawness of feeling is achieved through equally raw ambition. Bat for Lashes' sophisticated blend of art-rock grandeur and synth-pop directness again carries echoes of 1980s luminaries like Kate Bush and the Cure, gleaming with autoharp, Abbey Road-recorded strings, and a continuing exploration of electronics. Spacious, boldly orchestrated, and emotionally rich, Khan's latest is another step forward for the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, and one of the year's most beguiling albums. (Read More)


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Sources : Bat For Lashes Photo | Listen To Bat For Lashes | Bat For Lashes Biography | The Haunted Man Review

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