Tag: Bat for Lashes

Bat For Lashes Returns to Her Roots on “Lost Girls”

Bat For Lashes’ previous album, The Bride, wasn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser: a slow, deadly serious collection of songs about a woman whose husband-to-be dies on her wedding day. While I argued at the time (and still do) that it was an emotionally powerful and worthwhile record that took some audaciousness to release, it was easy to see why many found it unengaging. It’s also easy to see why she chose a more accessible direction on her new album, Lost Girls, which feels like a much-deserved vacation after such heavy material. It’s a shimmering, upbeat pop album that sounds like a love letter to the 80s music and cinema she grew up with.

If you’re like me, the last part raises some eyebrows, since we’re currently at peak “have you heard of this thing called the 80s” culture from Stranger Things and a gaggle of artists embracing that synth pop sound. And like it was hard to argue with The Bride being too slow and difficult, it’s also hard to take issue with anyone who is turned off by the nostalgia and references at play here. But I think it works on this album because Bat for Lashes is referencing a past she actually experienced, and I sense a genuine appreciation for the material she’s referencing instead of it being a cynical nostalgia-grab or put-on. Her whole career proves this in a way, because she was working with these sounds and reference points years ago before it became a cool thing to do. Lost Girls feels more like her coming full circle than her jumping on the bandwagon of 80s mythologizing.

What also helps Lost Girls become more than the sum of its nostalgic parts is that, well, the songs are great. Similar to some other pop acts I’ve appreciated in recent years like Kristin Kontrol and Carly Rae Jepsen, this album has a charming “I’m just here to write memorable pop songs” energy coming from an artist with a deep knowledge of the craft. The first five tracks on this album could all be classified as “jams” (good songs), starting with the lush “Kids in the Dark,” which introduces the album’s themes of young love that are further established on “The Hunger,” which has a similar slow-burn style with an organ added to the mix. “Feel For You” feels almost like a conscious attempt to see how simple she can make a song with it still being good — it’s just a recurring synth part and the lyric “I love you; I feel for you” over and over, yet it doesn’t feel underwritten to me in any way. The sparkling “Desert Man” and the whispery, seductive “Jasmine” close out this opening salvo of tracks, all of which prove that Bat For Lashes can still write catchy, listenable pop — she just didn’t feel like doing it on The Bride.

The instrumental “Vampires” segues into the final few tracks, most of which are slower ballads that are in the conventional Bat For Lashes style (meaning slow and beautiful). While this album lacks the emotional punch of The Bride, it’s a useful companion for showing another side of her artistry, and it’s satisfying to hear an album that doesn’t overreach. Without having some grand contrived narrative, Lost Girls still creates its own world that evokes feelings of youthful innocence and imagination.

#4: Bat for Lashes – “The Bride”

One of my favorite quotes from any television show is from Seinfeld, when Jerry is trying to beat a lie detector test and asks for George’s help. George gives this piece of advice: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

When it comes to musicians — and disproportionately women musicians — there is often an assumption that the singer is being “confessional” and sharing experiences from their own life. Artists who do this are applauded for being honest and real, for putting every piece of themselves into the music.

While I admittedly love albums like that too, I think it has become overemphasized, and it doesn’t give music enough credit as a storytelling medium, or the artists enough credit as weavers of fiction instead of people singing out of their diaries. And it doesn’t give fiction credit for sometimes being more truthful than reality.

The Bride is a work of pure fiction by Natasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, which might be why it got a fairly muted critical response compared to her usual work. But while this album is all “lies,” Khan believes them. She commits fully to her story of a woman whose husband dies on her wedding day, and in unraveling her story gradually through the album, she finds real truths and moments of deep sadness and humanity.

This album is audaciously slow-paced, requiring a level of patience that I’m not sure many listeners have, and I’m sympathetic to anyone who thought it was boring. But I really admired how it was so self-contained and how dedicated Khan was to telling her story on her terms, even though she had to know not many people would meet her halfway.

Bat for Lashes – “The Bride”

Nobody wants their art to be called boring. Artists say it in interviews all the time: “You know, you can love or hate my music, as long as you have a reaction to it and care about it. That’s what I’m really looking for.” Given how disastrous it is to be called boring, maybe the riskiest thing an artist can do is make something that invites the criticism head-on by eschewing excitement and novelty for subtlety and craft.

On her fourth album, The Bride, Natasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, takes that risk. It’s a concept album about a bride whose husband-to-be dies in a car accident on the way to a wedding, so she embarks on a honeymoon alone — not exactly something that is going to put asses in the seats, so to speak. Musically, the album is a similarly tough sell. Khan avoids the large-scale histrionics that might be expected of such a concept, instead focusing on quiet, contemplative songs that rarely offer the listener the satisfaction of a catchy chorus or a feel-good lyric.

And yet, The Bride is certainly not boring, at least to me, because Khan commits so fully to the concept, inhabiting her character and story and exploring its various themes — mostly heartbreak, with some bonus thoughts about the institution of marriage and how it affects women — with unusual depth for an album. Like a lot of “difficult” albums, it’s one that rewards the right listener, who has the patience to engage with it on Khan’s terms.

The Bride‘s greatest strength is Khan’s voice, which carries an album that is stacked with slow, melancholy songs that could be disengaging in the hands of a less talented vocalist. And more than just singing, Khan is also acting as the protagonist of this fictional story. That she pulls off this double-act is a testament to her talent, and it’s how The Bride works despite stacking the deck against itself with its inaccessible concept.

As for the story, it’s about what I expect from a concept album. It doesn’t have novel-level detail or development because it’s an album and that’s impossible, and it sometimes gets a bit repetitive with the “why me” and “where did my lover go” type lyrics. At the same time, it provides a through line that ties all of the songs together, and there is actual growth in Khan’s character over the course of the album, as she goes from excitement for her wedding, to heartbreak, to a kind of uplift and resolve at the end as she vows to love again.

For most of her career, like a lot of solo women artists, Khan has been burdened by comparisons to PJ Harvey, Kate Bush and Björk — singular artists who are impossible to truly replicate. On The Bride, she puts herself into that tier of innovative music storytellers, but does it in her own way with a work that feels very individual. It’s an album that is refreshing in its quiet boldness and its refusal to do the expected.