Bat For Lashes - Exot(er)ic fables from Brighton

When it comes to understanding certain artists better, it's always useful to take a peek into their past, particularly into the twists and turns of their often turbulent coming-of-age stories. This is really a principle that applies to every artist (and probably every human being), but for some it becomes an essential exercise. One such case is certainly that of Natasha Khan aka Bat For Lashes. The siren, the shrew, the man-hunter, the fairy, the heartbroken bride-to-be (and, as they say, the list goes on) from Brighton, who since her 2006 debut "Fur And Gold" has won over even the most hard-to-please critics as well as a rather wide audience, drawing in diehard indie fans and lovers of the catchiest pop alike.

Born to an English mother and a Pakistani father, Natasha Khan fell under the spell of the crowd very early on. Her father, her paternal grandfather and her uncle were all celebrated squash players, while several women in the family were stage actresses. So little Nat came to know, from a very young age, the thrill that a buzzing audience can give you. Of course, as a child she experienced that audience only at a remove, but closely enough to build up persistent fantasies and, very soon, the desire to have - and command - an audience of her own. The British chanteuse has often spoken of the visceral relationship she loves to build with her audience, of the strength she can draw from the roar of the crowd, which she has described as intense, ceremonial, ritualistic. All adjectives that suit Bat For Lashes' most epic songs perfectly, especially in their live dimension.

Family, then, was key to fuelling Natasha's hunger for an audience, for fame, but it also forced her to confront the narrow-mindedness of English provincial life very early on. Rickmansworth (Hertfordshire), the town where the Khans lived from the time Natasha was five, was hardly a haven of welcome and acceptance, and so our heroine had to deal with the bullying and racism of her schoolmates from her teenage years onward.

Still, ours was certainly not one to take things lying down, and so, in a moment of sheer exasperation, she swore in class and hurled a chair at a teacher. She was duly suspended. By the time she returned to school she had become the classic girl to avoid, the bad influence who would wreck your end-of-term grades. Practically an outcast.

It was during this period of deep fragility and frustration that Nat began writing her first songs: sad ballads for voice and piano – an instrument she taught herself to play at the age of eleven – as a way to channel her anger after her father left the family home.

With the family's finances in poor shape, Nat had to find a job after finishing high school. She ended up working as a factory hand at a dreary local paper packaging plant. Not exactly a dream job, but the long solitary shifts allowed the newly graduated teenager not only to spend hours on end listening back to her own music on an old portable CD player, but also to let her imagination run free, dreaming up new stories every day to turn into songs. Songs she'd listen to again the next day, and the day after that, searching for new details and nuances.

Having saved up a tidy sum opening and closing boxes, Natasha treated herself to three months travelling on the road across the US and Mexico. It was a long adventure that gave her plenty of memories and stories to tell, but above all new colours and inspirations to fold into her vivid musical imagination.

Back in the UK, she decided to move to the sunny seaside town of Brighton, where she would finally be able to align her passions with her education, enrolling in a degree course in Music and Visual Arts at the local university. During her studies she grew fascinated with experimental artists such as Steve Reich and Susan Hiller, who would remain lasting influences on her, alongside her old idols from 80s pop and darkwave.

Unsure whether she could make a living from music, the cautious Nat also trained as a kindergarten teacher, a profession she would practise for a long time in the seaside town south of London. Still, music remained an obsession for her, the kind that devours all your free time. Her passion and dedication to music would only pay off quite late, by which point Natasha was already twenty-seven. From then on, though, the artist's rise would be meteoric.

Nat's gold

It all happened very quickly and naturally. In 2006, thanks to a few well-placed contacts, Nat's debut single, "The Wizard", landed in the hands of Drowned In Sound, who didn't hesitate to releases it digitally and praise it on their pages. Its intimate yet mystical atmosphere, its fantastical setting, that icy voice which at times recalls Bjork, and that little keyboard, plinking away like a toy, won over plenty of hearts. It's a very shy song, one that creeps gently into listeners' heads, ensnaring them like a wizard's spell.

And my bat lightning heart

Wants to fly away

(from "What's A Girl To Do")

And as my heart ran round

My dreams pulled me from the ground

Forever to search for the flame

(from "Daniel")

Here am I

Lookin’ for a lover to burn the night

Lookin' for a lover to breathe to life

I am you

(from "Oh Yeah")

Life is so much dark and light

Day can not exist without a night

(from "Two Planets")

The Sex Witch

Fans would have to wait three years for Natasha Khan's next releases, but to our surprise it would not be a Bat For Lashes album, but rather a new, unsettling creature called SEXWITCH. The sex witch is certainly Nat, here more sensual and seductive than ever, but providing the rhythm and the psychedelic keyboard backdrops are TOY. Producing is the crafty console wizard Dan Carey, who had already produced both acts.

It is in fact Carey who grasps the potential, perhaps not commercially rewarding but certainly artistic, of a fusion between these two worlds. When Dan, while working on the production of The Haunted Man, learns of Natasha's passion for kraut rhythms and the most esoteric world music, this encounter seems inevitable to him. He thus decides to propose it to both parties, and so this brand-new supergroup begins working on the songs that would become SEXWITCH. Six fragments of folk and esoteric songs drawn from as many corners of the world give rise to highly compelling psychedelic compositions, where Natasha's voice, freed from conventional song structure, and one of the strongest rhythm sections in British independent music, drag the listener into a shamanic trance.

It wasn't enough, however, to simply put these two souls together, leave them alone in a recording studio and obtain the SEXWITCH sound through mere addition. Both parties involved had to sacrifice parts of their essence and reshape others. If, as we said, Khan freed herself from the pop conventions usually observed with Bat For Lashes, especially in recent times, TOY had to abandon their spacey ambitions, devoting themselves to more earthbound, folk-rooted twists and turns.

The two most distinctive tracks on the album are certainly "Ha Howa Ha Howa" and "Kassidat El Hakka", two rhythmic whirlwinds that envelop Natasha's tribal vocalizations, with rivers of keyboards in the background suggesting exotic echoes and stoking the trance. "Helelyos", on the other hand, within obvious limits, is the most urban and groovy track of the lot. The black magic that these three tracks manage to conjure up unfortunately fades somewhat in the slower songs, above all "Lam Plean Kiew Bao", a rather stale exercise in synthetic psychedelia of Indian extraction.

Walking out, walking out in this cold winter light

All the pretty girls, all the pretty ones have tears in their eyes

(from "Honeymooning Alone")

Destined to remain a fetish object for Bat For Lashes fans more accustomed to experimental sounds, SEXWITCH represents a one-off in Natasha Khan's career and to this day has had no follow-up. It is nonetheless an effective, definitive confirmation of an artist with an extremely varied background, always brave enough to follow her own instincts and embark on ventures with little commercial appeal. Fans, fewer in number than they once were, would only have to wait one more year, though, for chapter four of the Bat For Lashes saga: The Bride.

Bat For Lashes' synth-pop has always had dark undertones, but on The Bride something different happens: this is extremely bleak music, where darkness is no longer reduced to a few shadings but becomes overwhelming, oppressive. The usual synthesizers are played like funeral organs and leave very little room for beats, which trudge along at a crawl. Like those of a lifeless heart, they are sometimes absent altogether. There's also the odd western-style guitar (for instance on "Honeymooning Alone" and "Widow's Peak", which are likely the legacy of Jacknife Lee, here alongside Carey in the producer's chair), enriching a scenario that's already decidedly subdued and evocative, tilting it toward the dusty feel of some good old road movie. The only track that could have fit on previous records, given its glossier sound, is "Sunday Love".

"Honeymooning Alone" opens with the sounds of a car crash: the piercing screech of brakes, the bodywork crumpling in a violent impact. It's the death of a groom on his way to the altar, who will leave the titular protagonist of the album alone forever. This is the simple, tragic story behind this mournful, grief-stricken concept, behind the veil and the makeup smeared by tears that Nat, still gorgeous, wears on the artwork.

The album's thirteen tracks follow one another like chapters in a novel or a Quentin Tarantino film, with Natasha's siren voice singing everything in the first person: the accident, the endless wait at the altar, the revelation of the tragic news, the ensuing despair, the desperate flight, the arduous process of grieving the loss. This is a new modus operandi for Khan, who, despite having already tried her hand at other concept albums, had never before adhered so strictly to the structures of the genre. It's an approach that finds its strength and triumph in the singer's total identification with the album's protagonist. Indeed, the recording of many of the songs was repeatedly interrupted because our heroine kept breaking down into sobs.

This is certainly the least immediate and most demanding record Bat For Lashes has ever released, asking listeners to look past the absence of rhythm and catchy hooks and focus instead on the work done with details and nuance. It's therefore the album that marks its author's definitive break from trends and fashions. Natasha is now determined to go her own way, whether that means the valley of tears of a brokenhearted little bride or the tangled woodland path of a seductive sex-hungry hag.

Love is a nowhere land

(from "Desert Man")

You're lost little girls

Less strictly than The Bride, 2019's Lost Girls is also a concept album, though certainly more fragmentary than its predecessor and spread across several narrative threads. The scenarios it moves through are clear even before you press play, thanks to a title that's practically a mission statement, dedicated to the album's female protagonists while simultaneously referencing Joel Schumacher's 80s cult classic. That iconic Lost Boys, with its teenage vampires led by a supremely cool Kiefer Sutherland and a legendary soundtrack that a few tracks from Lost Girls could easily have slotted into.

The first thing that comes to mind listening to it is that the Eighties, which Bat For Lashes has always flirted with, are here reinterpreted more directly, with more nostalgia than revisionist spirit; the sleek, unsettling pulse of the drum machines on "Feel For You", and the most retro, danceable track of the bunch, "So Good".

The genre shift from the old film's title isn't the only connection to it. The synth haze of "Kids In The Dark", the looming, funereal organ that drives "The Hunger" alongside beats in the style of Tears For Fears, and the nocturnal saxophone that coils around the Smiths-like arpeggio of "Vampires" could all soundtrack a suburban night shot on super 8.

Stirred by a velvety rhythm and evanescent keyboard arpeggios, "Desert Man" showcases all the experience and vocal class Nat has built up over the years; while the following "Jasmine" is a car ride through the neon lights of Chromatics, with a taste for synths even more faithful to the Eighties than the Seattle band's own.

The album closes with a pair of atmospheric tracks: "Peach Sky", with its metallic rhythm and deliciously jarring melody, and the reflective "Mountains", yet another showcase of vocal flair: a voluptuous siren song that leaves you craving new songs by the end of the first listen.

Allowing for a natural dip in energy in its second half, Lost Girls adds new shades to a now substantial and essential discography within the landscape of alternative pop of recent decades. At the same time, such a disorienting record shatters any hope of predicting its author's future moves. Good going, Nat.

The mother

Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes, had never made us wait this long for a record before. We last heard from her in 2019, when "Lost Girl" steered her music back toward a fuller, more fully-formed song structure and sounds deliberately aimed at the 1980s. This is a direction that The Dream Of Delphi seems to reject entirely, absorbed in a spiritual (almost) absence of beats and turned completely inward, toward the inner world of the artist of Anglo-Kazakh descent.

And it couldn't be otherwise, because Nat is no longer who she used to be, as she herself has reiterated in several interviews ahead of the releases of this, her sixth record. Taking place in California in 2020, the birth of her daughter Delphi (from whom the album takes its title) changed everything for Khan, who embraced motherhood so viscerally that she experienced it as a kind of rebirth into a new identity – that, precisely, of a mother.

The Dream Of Delphi is, to all intents and purposes, a dream painted by Bat For Lashes: a dream of her daughter, a dream for her daughter. Babbling vocals, stretched-out rhythms, mournful strings and pastoral glimpses are the founding elements of her most abstract record to date.

Still light years away from the factory-made pop songs that we've come to expect from BFL, with its insistent synth arpeggio and the snapping rhythm that cleaves the track in half like some kind of synthetic sun, the opening track (which also titles the album) is in fact as exquisite as it is deceptive. We'll have to wait a full four tracks before encountering the next (and only other) song, the engaging single “Home”.

In between, and after, we find stretched-out passages of every kind (“Christmas Day”), romantic piano flights toward an engaging ethereal finale (the marvellous “At Your Feet”), and synthetic forays with oriental flavours leaning toward new age (“Breaking Up”, “Delphi Dancing”).

Even when the words are few and far between, or entirely absent, the song titles suggest a kind of emotional diary of the days of pregnancy and the first years of little Delphi's life (“The Midwives Has Left”, “Her Fisrt Morning”).

The Dream Of Delphi is a record unlike anything Bat For Lashes has let us hear so far. And it couldn't be otherwise. “It’s about what happens when you’re stretched physically, mentally, even vaginally! (Riguarda quello che succede quando sei dilatate fisicamente, mentalmente e addirittura vaginalmente)”, the chanteuse told Rolling Stone. Stretched, rarefied, pensive: these are indeed the first words that come to mind to describe it.

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