Bat For Lashes - The Haunted Man Review

By Darren Millard / October 16, 2012

rating: 4

The album cover is The Haunted Mans visual manifesto: more minimal, seemingly vulnerable, but only on the surface. Fuzzy synths in album opener Lilies crumble around Natasha Khans quietly confident crooning and an erudite guitar gets slowly plucked in the mistily-produced latter half of the song. Khans earnest voice intones thank God Im alive, and it sounds like she means it. Theres a worn shoebox quality to the clip-clop percussion of All Your Gold that really pushes forward the apparent sparseness and restraint employed over the course of this album in comparison to previous record Two Suns. The lyrics evoke the haunted man theme of the record, wherein she sings and youre a good man, as though the person shes addressing needs such a reassurance, or indeed her own person. The songs orchestral denouement is both solemn and comforting. Theres a noticeably grainier and less glossy feel to the albums production, and if anything it comes closer to a lo-fi presentation than the crystal-clear crunch of the drums in songs from her previous full-length, Glass, for example. Horses Of the Sun is like a meditative call-to-arms at sunset, the fleeting horse-hoove clip of the drums and Khans anthemic cry a noticeably more contained and Earth-bound listen than the astrono-mystical imagery from Two Suns. Oh Yeah has the sweetest and most nostalgic synths Ive heard in a while, like infomercial indents from an 80s documentary on television personalities. The overall mood of the song is like floating through the cosmos of a Casio keyboards insides (if you get my drift). Laura is stunning; featuring an addictive and emotional piano refrain that rolls along with the best and most nuanced vocal performance Ive ever heard from Bat For Lashes. Her voice is the guiding force in this track, which is surprisingly not something that can be said for the rest of the album. The horns that ease in throughout the song add an impressively restrained grandeur that never oversteps its welcome. Surely one of the best songs released this year. Its followed undauntedly by the profoundly contemplative wheeze of strings and organ that sound like theyre being played via a wormhole from a snowy English past. The dense staccato of orchestral strings and Khans commanding yet endearingly fragile voice make this one of the more traditionally sounding Bat For Lashes songs, and there is also a bit of Kate Bush lurking in its English blood. In close competition with Laura for the most immediately impressive song on the album goes to Marilyn, its hard urgent drums, wormy synths and the cloudy swirl of Khans voice riding on top of a repetitive and God-forsakenly catchy lyrical refrain: Hold on Im touching a star, Turning into Marilyn leaning out of your big car. The choral roar of a male choir behind Khans voice as she utters the last few syllables of the former line is goosebump-inducing. And as a whole, this entire record is either what youd consider a push forward for Bat For Lashes abilities as a songwriter or a compulsive side-step into territory antithetical to the overwrought look-at-me theatricality of mainstreamers like Lady Gaga and Florence & the Machine (a guise Bat For Lashes was once in mind for). In fact, the only clunker that bothers me is a lyrical one, in a track I deem to be a song of the year contender: Laura and the line youre the train that crashed my heart. Otherwise, this is a very enjoyable set of songs, and different enough to Lashes previous output to indicate artistic growth.