Natasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, has an uncanny knack for world-building, an ability to craft a musical and aesthetic environment brimming with rich scenes and fantastical characters. Moving gradually from folk and chamber music to emotional electronic pop over four albums, she’s been able to carve out an uncompromising niche for herself, and while not as musically stunning as her last two records (2009’s Two Suns and 2012’s The Haunted Man, both excellent benchmarks for her brand of self-contained yet grandiose songwriting), The Bride may be Bat for Lashes’ most ambitious project yet, a true concept album, every song tightly woven into a through narrative from start to finish.
The Bride tells the story of a woman left at the altar—not because her fiancé skipped out on the occasion but because he died in a car crash on his way to the wedding. The eponymous Bride then finds herself alone and unmoored on her own honeymoon, grieving the loss of her true love and trying to find the strength to piece together the rest of her life. Written as a soundtrack to an imagined movie, it commits to Bat for Lashes’ previous flirtations with going full storybook while never sounding contrived or heavy-handed. Although The Bride is relatively more stripped down than what we’ve come to expect from Bat for Lashes, Khan has no trouble filling the space with her signature lofty soprano, which does all the dramatic work the storyline needs to feel real.
The album’s opener, the idyllic “I Do,” is a bit of a red herring–its strummed harpsichord and simple melody harks back to Fur & Gold, Bat for Lashes’ debut album and first foray into the persona she's meticulously constructed over the rest of her career. It does its job, setting up the scene, but it feels pallid after her previous records, and stirs concerns that Khan’s storyline might be shortchanging her songcraft. Luckily, by the time we get to lead single “Sunday Love” The Bride has hit its stride, the track’s shuffling drum loop and plucked strings transporting listeners directly into the mania of the Bride’s pure heartbreak. From there, what began as a slightly unbalanced collection begins to take shape: the quiet duo of “Never Forgive the Angels” and “Close Encounters” signal both the emotional core of the record and the stage where Khan’s character begins to lose touch with reality. “Some say my lover is a pale green light […] I feel him come to me in the dead of night/And I go to the other side” she sings, and it's a beautiful moment musically and within the context of the record: The Bride realizes, through swelling synths, that death, rather than being an absolute barrier, is more of a shifting veil between herself and her beloved.
The second half of the album is a long, tapered comedown from this peak, with the soft guitars and mellow strings of “In Your Bed” and “Clouds” feeling like the tail end of a crying jag, when you’ve used up all your tears and lay exhausted on the floor. It’s still sad, but a peaceful sadness, one that ends the album on a semi-uplifting note. At its essence, The Bride is a sort of anti-breakup album, a story where the absence of physical love doesn’t mark the dissolution of a romantic relationship, but rather its strengthening through celebration and remembrance. Through the metaphor of her character, Khan weaves a story about the most simple of poetic themes–eternal love–but devoid of all the sappiness and clichés one would normally associate with those ideas. Its few shortcomings aside, The Bride is further proof that Khan, unlike almost all of her contemporaries, understands how to wade into mystical realms and emerge with big, beguiling pop.
