Bat for Lashes - The Haunted Man (2012)

 

1) Lilies; 2) All Your Gold; 3) Horses of the Sun; 4) Oh Yeah; 5) Laura; 6) Winter Fields; 7) The Haunted Man; 8) Marilyn; 9) A Wall; 10) Rest Your Head; 11) Deep Sea Diver

It's still recognisably Bat for Lashes but it's all... full of light and joy?

Key tracks: "Lilies", "All Your Gold", "Oh Yeah"

On the covers of her first two albums Natasha Khan dressed up in feathers, elaborate headwear and gothic garments of various kinds, stood in mystic settings and was surrounded by props. She evoked magic and fantasy, emphasised the imagery to bring her concept-heavy songs to life. On the front of The Haunted Man she’s stark naked against a plain gray backdrop, only accompanied by her titular haunted man who is just as bare as she is. It’s an intentional contrast - a sign of dropping any pretense, toning down the make-belief and coming forward as just herself.

The long and short of The Haunted Man is that it offers a more naked sound than the first two Bat for Lashes albums as well as a similarly more direct lyrical style instead of the former flowery prose. The idea seems to have been to show off Natasha Khan rather than the stylistically exaggerated character of the original albums, to do away with the bat lightning hearts and split personality concepts and to bring out Khan’s own voice. She's also returned to the more sparsely arranged sound of the debut over the maximalist pop production of Two Suns, though sparse is perhaps the wrong word. There’s a clear emphasis on few distinct elements per song over a busy sonic soundscape - with a steady minimalistic drum machine as one of the frequent main contributors - but the sound has been given space to breathe, resulting in the arrangements sounding very lush. The production is both lightweight and grand, with the gothic halls of yore switched to vast natural plains; soundwise alone, The Haunted Man is wonderful to listen to. Khan herself sounds not just free-spirited but more confident, like this is the first time that she is performing as herself rather than as a stylistically exaggerated character and she’s relishing every moment of it. When she joyously shouts “thank god I’m alive” as the music bursts into a rich orchestral bliss in the opener “Lilies”, it’s such a genuine expression of emotion that it hits the listener just as strongly as it does her. Whether it was the goal or not, The Haunted Man sounds like an album of personal liberation.

The flipside with the new approach is that it’s made Khan’s songwriting less consistent. A number of tracks have length issues as the more atmospheric approach accidentally allows them to either meander a little too long for their own good or to mistake a lush production for something more tangible. There is a noticeable gap between the key tracks and the rest of the album, and in fact “Horses of the Sun” is the first Bat for Lashes album track you could call downright weak, making a lot of clatter without going anywhere for five minutes. It’s a shame, because when The Haunted Man hits the point it successfully combines the eccentricity of the debut with the otherworldly pop songs of the second album. “All Your Gold”, “Oh Yeah”, the before-mentioned “Lilies” and the transforming title track are all excellent, but it’s the airy synthpop piece “A Wall” that has sneakily managed to become the album’s moment of purest musical delight, marrying the directly inviting tone that made “Daniel” from Two Suns such a prior standout with the new open, floating sound to a most hooking effect.

There is, in addition, also the somber piano ballad “Laura”, the oft-cited highlight that seems to have become The Haunted Man’s standout moment, but to me it’s always felt a little strange. It’s a really good song in all honesty, but it was co-written with the Lana Del Rey collaborator Justin Parker and you can hear it. Khan and piano are normally a winning combination but this time it comes off more like a Del Rey track than a Bat for Lashes one - not a bad thing in itself, but it comes off clunky in the context of the album and sounds like a standalone bonus track thrown in the middle of Khan’s personal collection.

A mixed bag, then. The Haunted Man sounds exactly the right step for Khan to have taken - it expands her sound, keeps the familiar elements but twists them into a new form and sees her stepping out of one guise into another, showing she has the range for it. And, yet, it does so with slightly uneven results - mostly interesting, sometimes great, occasionally rather meandering and a couple of times about to derail. The Haunted Man does give you a better idea of her chops and it’s a captivating enough listen, but it’d be hard to argue against her previous albums being more compelling as a whole.

Rating: 7/10