Bat for Lashes - The Bride (2016)

1) I Do; 2) Joe's Dream; 3) In God's House; 4) Honeymooning Alone; 5) Sunday Love; 6) Never Forgive the Angels; 7) Close Encounters; 8) Widow's Peak; 9) Land's End; 10) If I Knew; 11) I Will Love Again; 12) In Your Bed

Finally dwelling deeper into those soundtrack-like qualities of the prior albums with a full on concept album, but that concept seems to come before the songs.

Key tracks: "In God's House", "Sunday Love", "Close Encounters"

It was only a matter of time until Bat for Lashes came up with a bonafide concept album given the love for wider themes that Natasha Khan has demonstrated in her prior albums, and The Bride couldn't be more BfL-esque if it tried. With so much of the Bat for Lashes discography centered around romantic notions that are more longing than loving and almost fatalistic in their devotion, naturally the first full-on story that Khan devises is about a bride-to-be is left alone at the altar after the groom is killed in a car crash on the way to the church. Amidst her grieving, the never-wed decides to take the intended honeymoon trip by herself while searching for answers and meaning in the universe. The Bride wanders the mountains and the seas, connects spiritually with her former partner and ultimately finds the first strands of will to go on, but ultimately the story arc is left unresolved - because how could you ever neatly reconcile such a dramatic loss?

It's always been obvious that soundtracks rank highly among Khan's musical inspirations, and one of the biggest compliments you can give to The Bride is how much it sounds like a score to a film she put her vocal tracks over. Khan weaves dramatic arcs, builds tension and sets up narrative threads in the way a director puts together a film - the songs act as scenes that link together into a greater whole, where everything serves the narrative first and foremost. You don't even need to know it's a concept album to understand that, simply because of how vividly the music tells the story. It's in no small part because the musical language Khan uses throughout is closer to film scores than indie pop albums: the sound here is deeply atmospheric and leaves a space for the narrative to course through, built on sparse elements which are used less as melodic tools and more as methods to decorate the unfolding scenes, where percussion is minimal at best. Khan's voice in the center is practically ethereal thanks to the vast amounts of space the arrangements leave around it, and she brings the central character to life with dramatic, actor-like yearning. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if someone did think this actually is an expanded accompaniment to a visual counterpiece, and I have to give Khan kudos for how The Bride is both a film and its soundtrack at once.

You know there's a 'but' though, and it's a two-fold matter. Despite its narrative cohesion, The Bride as an album is one of two halves where the first steps take wider moves with a bit of a beat to their step, while the second half sinks deep into that soundtrack feel by acting as singular suite of sustained moods. The first set of songs is closer to the established core sound for Bat for Lashes and does well merging this album's more widescreen ideas into Khan's ideas of pop songs. They're not among Khan's best compositions but they leave a lingering impression and in their own right are a stable ground to build an album on. The drama of "In God's House" is what truly kicks the album into gear after the intentionally and ingeniously sweet bridal march "I Do" and the nervous "Joe's Dream" act as the extended intro and it sounds a little special on that alone, and "Sunday Love" dashes forward with a nervous step and injects some much-needed energy to the record after four songs of moody marching. It's an impressive start even if not such a stand-out outside the album context, but what that initial run of songs does do is build up the tragedy and ache of the album, steadily winding the spring tighter, for that pay-off to come.

It never does. I mentioned how the album's story arc feels like it's missing an ending, and that carries through to the music. The entire bottom half of the record is one anonymous mood piece, exquisitely crafted but oddly empty: illustrating scenes to film which, at the end of the day, doesn't exist. It's rather pretty at places - "Land's End" and "If I Knew" especially - but in practice what happens is that the dramatic (and musical) build up of the first half ends up fizzling out quietly before the abrupt credits roll. Much of the final run of songs feel like segues or bridges between greater moments, but with all those important cornerstones missing and all you have are the thin strands. They're inconsequential and unmemorable at worst, and lovely enough ambience with no depth at best. Making matters inadvertently a little worse is "Close Encounters" which starts off that sequence of spatial ballads, and which is the one song on this record I would count as among Khan's very best. Made out of mostly just strings, her voice and a celestial choir of backing vocals, in this one song she consolidates together all the pain and longing that the album's central story arc is built around to a most devastating degree, with a chorus melody that is one of the most immediately piercing and disarming moments she has ever committed to tape. Everything that comes afterwards tries to do the same but sound like half-thought epilogues, all one after another: a stream of songs with barest of ideas that disappear into one another as well as into the ether immediately after hearing them.

I do honestly admire the ideas that Khan presents on The Bride and it has all the makings of a truly special Bat for Lashes album, one which would dive delightfully deep into the musical and thematic concepts that have been lurking around in the background for a while. The ideas around the production and the arrangements, the widescreen drama in the actual music itself and Khan's vocal performance (probably her best so far) are all top notch and clear takeaways from the album. It's almost unfair then how the actual songs fall short, and the further the album moves the less life it has. The danger of concept albums is when the concept overrides the musical content and you can see it happen here: the trappings are all in place but as a set of songs - in melodies, hooks, emotional resonance - it's Khan's weakest so far. The comparisons to soundtracks feel so apt once more, because so many scores turn out be incredibly meandering no matter how much you love the source material when the visual accompaniment they're meant to go with is stripped away. The arrangements for The Bride favour space, but the deeper you get into the album the more it feels like it's just emptiness. There are many things to love The Bride for - I'm not rating this all the way to the bottom, after all - but as a selection of music it's almost underbaked.

Rating: 6/10

 

Physical corner: A gatefold with a lyrics/art booklet. All in wonderfully glossy packaging throughout though, which I'm such a sucker for.

CMX - Vainajala (1998)

1) Iskusävelmä; 2) Surunmurhaaja; 3) Vainajala; 4) Vierasta viljaa; 5) Ei yksikään; 6) Taivaan lapset; 7) Sillanrakentaja; 8) Laulu palavasta linnusta; 9) Eufrat; 10) Kirjeitä paratiisista; 11) Arkangeli; 12) Vanha talvitie

CMX kick off their next chapter with an honest, loud rock album.

Key tracks: "Surunmurhaaja", "Taivaan lapset", "Arkangeli"

Vainajala is a skin shedding moment for CMX. After an early career full of divergent musical strands, the band have figured out who they are and more importantly, how to blend all that raw power, emotional grace and trickster prog flair into a singular sound that represents CMX above anything else. Along with that, they’ve got a new drummer with Tuomas Peippo whose machine-like precision serves as the perfect technical and diverse backbone to the band's growing ideas. Unlike the prior handful of albums which had long gestation periods due to the band figuring things out within the studio, the idea for Vainajala was to go with gut feeling and capture the spark quickly. Faith No More’s Billy Gould was enlisted as the producer as CMX holed up in a Lapland cabin for a mere couple of weeks to crank out the record, and the change in the man behind the desk to someone brand new instead of the old friends who produced the prior albums has arguably been just as important to the band in helping them forge ahead a new path. In the greater scheme of things Vainajala was a bit of a detour in itself and rather unrepresentative of the next stretch of records, but it was a palate cleanser, wiping the slate clean for the next steps.

Funny enough, Vainajala turned out to be an honest rock album. It’s not the much dreaded "back to basics" - CMX’s basics were never like this - but it is an intentionally more straightforward album, even if the prog rock tendencies creep in subtly by way of understated time signature shenanigans and little segments like the non sequitur breakdown of lead single "Ei yksikään". It's an album lead by big guitars and the sturdy classic four-member rock band groove, with A.W. Yrjänä alternating between a shouting maniac and a charismatic frontman as he adopts both sides of his frontman persona - it's music that's meant to be played loud, ideally in front of people. After the line-up changes and restless changes in direction, its role is a succint and instinctive re-introduction for the band as well as a needed re-focus to line the sights up for the future. As these things often go, it’s not a particularly nuanced or deep album, and you can easily say that not only has much of the band's former edge been toned down, but that there is definitely a really fine line between the album as it stands and a safe, radio-friendly rock album - by the Finnish definition of one, at least. 

 
Vainajala holds its ground because ultimately it’s a (pun intended) rock solid record. The songwriting favours punchy hooks over artistic flair but the little prog tangents and Yrjänä's lyricism (can't say I've heard many rock songs tap onto the Kalevala meter like "Laulu palavasta linnusta" does) keep it distinguishably CMX-esque. There's always been a good couple get-to-the-chorus rock jams per album and CMX know how to carve their crooked melodies within a more foot tap inviting structure, and this just happens to be an album full of them for once. Gould's production isn't flashy but it's got some muscle to it which befits the chosen direction, and the band-centric arrangements mean that the few keyboard and backing vocal parts that do appear sound all the more lush. There's no new ideas for CMX within Vainajala, but you are effectively dealing with a great rock band playing snappy rock songs with a renewed spirit, and it's hard to complain about it - especially when the hits keep coming. A handful of these reach all the way to the hallowed canon: the twinkling "Taivaan lapset" is exhuberantly melodic, "Laulu palavasta linnusta" fiercely battering rams ahead, and "Vanha talvitie" is one of the band's all time great closers, lurching forward full of deep melancholy and purging volume, its ever-towering coldness growing into handsome heights. CMX work excellently as "just" a rock band as well, which Vainajala demonstrates excellently. It's only a few times where it feels like the band is starting to run on thin ince, namely the schlager-leaning "Sillanrakentaja" and "Kirjeitä paratiisista" (which wastes its powerful opening, leading on from the interlude/intro "Eufrat") lean a little too close to less exciting radio rock waters; I've also never been too taken by the prog-punk gremlin "Ei yksikään" despite its memetic scream-along chorus, as it feels like a song trying to be tricky for tricky's sake with its tempo shifts and stop-starts, which end up muddling the tune more than they make it interesting. But they're minor bumps than blemishes, and quickly brushed off. 

That said, some of the songs that stick the hardest are the ones where the band stray from the core thesis. The particularly brilliant "Surunmurhaaja" wraps its manic ruckus within entrancingly atmospheric verses which are unlike anything else on the record, and "Arkangeli" towards the end is a serene acoustic ballad that turns out to be one of the album's stand-out moments, part in due because that contrast is a welcome respite by that point in the runtime, but also because it features one of Yrjänä's most beautiful vocal melodies in the chorus with a particularly fantastic backing vocal part emphasising that melody. "Vierasta viljaa" starts as an acoustic ballad as well to showcase early on that not everything here is guitars-to-eleven, but when it finally does break out the electrics for its final chorus the effect is magnified and it's one of the boldest parts of the record - the parts you remember the most. And somewhere there lies the distillation of where my overall opinion on Vainajala stands. There's no doubt that it's a really good record, but it's also not an album that I think about when I reach out for CMX. Next to its more flamboyant peers it starts to grow pale and its most interesting parts are the ones where the band do something a little more different than what the rest of the album actually stands for. 

I don't like rating "against" an album because it's a more straightforward rock record - my tastes are nowhere near complicated enough to even pretend I could do that with a good conscience - but as good as CMX are playing things loud and straight, it's not where their greatest appeal lies. Vainajala is an album of bangers and there's a time and place for that - but I actually associate some of these songs more closely with their places in later compilation albums than this actual tracklist. Nonetheless, it sets off CMX's next chapter with a blast, and that re-energising would serve the band brilliantly going forward. That alone gives it a place in the pantheon.

Rating: 7/10

Physical corner: In a typical CMX fashion, a basic jewel case with a standard-good booklet featuring some artwork, the lyrics and a band shot. You've been here before with these guys, you know the drill.

Bat for Lashes - Two Suns (2009)

1) Glass; 2) Sleep Alone; 3) Moon and Moon; 4) Daniel; 5) Peace of Mind; 6) Siren Song; 7) Pearl's Dream; 8) Good Love; 9) Two Planets; 10) Travelling Woman; 11) The Big Sleep

Taking the right lessons away from the debut, this is where Khan establishes what Bat for Lashes stands for.

Key tracks: "Glass", "Daniel", "Pearl's Dream"

I spoke in my review for Fur and Gold how that album has lost its shimmer as years have gone by, but on the other hand Two Suns has has only begun to shine brighter with time. Natasha Khan's sophomore album as Bat for Lashes is exactly how you should follow up a debut with potential like Fur and Gold, by taking those unique elements that did work the first time around and fearlessly double down on them by expanding and refining. The results speak for themselves: Two Suns has become synonymous with Bat for Lashes and still remains as the number one thing that comes to my mind when I hear Khan's name.

What sets Two Suns apart from its predecessor - and most of the other Bat for Lashes albums in general - is its go-big-or-go-home attitude. There was a lot going on in the background during the recording process and Khan, always fond of expressing herself theatrically, imbibed on it: a relationship started and ended during the writing process which became the album's cornerstone inspiration, she followed her new love to New York where the album was largely recorded, and during her adventures there she devised an alter ego named Pearl who she dressed up as during her tenure in the States and who crops up in a handful of songs. Those big notions and grand gestures in turn influenced the music to grow in a similar fashion, and so Two Suns makes a clear departure from the debut’s skeletal bedroom gloom by presenting itself more vividly. "Glass", the opener, starts with a quiet hymnal which could easily have been at home within the debut but it soon breaks into a storm of layered percussion and bellowing vocals, Khan stretching her wings as she breaks away from the chrysalis of the debut into the new, multi-layered world. Where debut avoided dramatic musical gestures, Two Suns revels in them.

Khan and her musical language nestle into that perfectly. Two Suns isn’t about towering bombast or epic measures, but Khan is painting her visions with a fuller palette which makes the songs reach higher. She still finds solace in minimal soundscapes as and when seen fit - the beautiful piano ballad "Moon and Moon", the askew gospel of "Peace of Mind", the haunting Scott Walker-backed closing lullaby "The Big Sleep" - but she's juxtaposing them by adopting new rulesets for the other songs, the most important of which is really leaning into that knack for a spellbinding hook she's got. She's writing something close to pop songs now and she's perfect at balancing that more direct approach with a more fleshed-out production that emphasises her signature traits. The jaunty and twangy "Sleep Alone", anthemic "Pearl's Dream" and percussion rave of "Two Planets" are Khan's versions of widescreen pop songs and they're sublime, clearly from the same dreamland the debut conjured up but more vivid and commanding. None moreso than the lead single "Daniel". Khan has always loved the 1980s and that influence will crop up throughout her back catalogue in a myriad of ways; "Daniel" is her take on the dramatic synth pop songs littered throughout that decade which rushed through their showstopper choruses with near-anxious urgency. She's done many songs more intricate and more specifically characteristic to her than the tribute flair of "Daniel", but she's never done anything as instantly gripping and lastingly striking. "Daniel" stands out as Khan's signature song for a reason, a once-in-a-career big hit (from an artistic perspective, though to a lesser extent commercially too) single that stands timelessly within her own ouevre despite its clear influences.

I make a number of comparisons between the debut and Two Suns because to me they are clearly linked and in particular how the latter feels like wish fulfillment based on the former, as if Khan and I had shared the mild criticisms I had of that record and she went forward exactly how I wanted her to go for the follow-up. "Horse & I" and "What's a Girl to Do?" were such massive standouts on the debut because they were so much livelier than anything else on that album and Two Suns takes their wider arrangements as the blueprint for an entire album. Even the subtler moments feel more developed than most of the debut, "Moon and Moon" and the achingly solemn "Travelling Woman" in particular sounding all the more vulnerable and longing because of how they contrast with their immediate neighbours. Two Suns is an obvious case of an artist understanding the breadth of their talent and making it their goal to bring that artistic growth to life in full bloom, confidently and fearlessly. The whole album feels like it has a point to prove about its importance - from the attention-demanding arrangements to the inter-referential lyrics that give the album an air of a pseudo-concept record - which Khan and her team took great effort to make sure they can back that point up. In doing so, Two Suns established itself as the center of Khan's galaxy; an excellent record highlighting every reason why one should fall in love with Bat for Lashes.

Rating: 8/10

Physical corner: A standard jewel case with a fairly minimal and short booklet with no lyrics apart from the verse from Song of Solomon (quoted in "Glass" and referenced later in "Two Planets"). It's not particularly interesting, though if you want concrete proof of the wider arrangements on this album compared to the debut, the size of the track-by-track credits section makes it obvious.