Natasha Khan has said her third album as Bat for Lashes is partly inspired by studying her own family history. This is informative. Her father, a trainer for the Pakistani national squash team, left suddenly when she was 11, and his departure casts a shadow on the fairytale drama of Bat for Lashes' debut, 2006's Fur and Gold. Yeah, but one of the guys Khan's dad coached? Her cousin, Jahangir Khan? He went on to become a six-time world champion and basically his sport's equivalent of a Pelé or Michael Jordan. You don't need Natasha's Ancestry.com password to know there's competitive drive in her blood.
That's her up there in The Haunted Man cover art. Naked, un-retouched, and un-made-up, with a similarly naked man draped around her shoulders. The suggestion is that her follow-up to 2009's lavishly sensual Two Suns is more intimate and stripped bare, and sure enough, there's less reverb on Khan's voice, and the lyrical concerns have moved from an otherworldly New York to the English countryside. But what the Ryan McGinley-shot art most closely shares with the music you'll find within is that it's at once striking and enigmatic-- and artfully constructed.
Some albums sound effortless. The Haunted Man sounds like effort magnificently realized. The rawness of feeling is achieved through equally raw ambition. Bat for Lashes' sophisticated blend of art-rock grandeur and synth-pop directness again carries echoes of 1980s luminaries like Kate Bush and the Cure, gleaming with autoharp, Abbey Road-recorded strings, and a continuing exploration of electronics. Spacious, boldly orchestrated, and emotionally rich, Khan's latest is another step forward for the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, and one of the year's most beguiling albums.
Two Suns' sublime, Karate Kid-nodding "Daniel" won Britain's Ivor Novello songwriting award. The potential hits here are just as overpowering. "Let's Get Lost", the sumptuous slab of goth-bubblegum Khan did with Beck for 2011's Twilight: Eclipse OST, was a promising sign of what to expect. On slinky, guitar-centric "All Your Gold", Khan is the one who's haunted, but it only takes a few listens before Gotye's awfully similar smash sounds fleshless in comparison. "Marilyn" adapts the 1950s matinee-idolatry of Lana Del Rey to a dream-pop production worthy of its "silver screen," with a staggering, spectral bridge-- and several instrumental contributions from Beck (plus arranging by ex-Ash member Charlotte Hatherley).
Though sometimes over-reaching, the less likely singles here are as darkly enigmatic, sonically curious, and thematically textured as their equivalents on Two Suns. The centerpiece is the title track, with its "Scarborough Fair"-tinged male choir marching up that distant hill. "Yes, your ghosts have got me, too/ But it's me and you," Khan replies, summing up the album's main conceit: the way previous experiences can twist our current relationships. On M83-gauzy, Dave Sitek-assisted opener "Lilies", though, "the figure of a man" answers a life-affirming, womanly prayer. Druid-like male voices on "Oh Yeah" introduce the poised yet passionate exultation of a narrator "in bloom." As on the album cover, Khan's music can acknowledge the female body without reducing it to sex-kitten cliché.
In fact, if the last album was about contrasts-- between two suns, two lovers, even two sides of the narrator's persona-- then The Haunted Man is defined by balance, between the bare and the polished, between the communal and the personal, and between the respective ghosts haunting our personal interactions. Compromises can lead to breakthroughs: "Where you see a wall, I see a door," Khan sings on "A Wall", another Sitek-backed, baroque synth-pop anthem. By the restrained yet intricate closing lullaby "Deep Sea Diver", which meets the bar set by Two Suns' collaborative finale with famously reclusive crooner Scott Walker, Khan finds a compromise for two people separated by masks: "Darling if you can't see out/ You know that I can hear you shout." They're together, alone, shaking through.
The most overtly naked track here, "Laura", is also the most transcendent. With a gently orchestra-kissed piano-and-voice arrangement, this goosebump-inducing collaboration with the former Lizzy Grant's "Video Games" co-writer Justin Parker is the clearest example of how Bat for Lashes perches on the fulcrum between indie-associated sincerity and pop-oriented savvy. We'll never know Laura, really, but we can feel what it might be like to know her. On an album with more names in the credits than Khan could ever use for song titles (also including Portishead's Adrian Utley, among many others), the greatest testament to her strength of will might be just this: She has added a new unforgettable character to pop's family tree.
