Bat for Lashes Issue #39

Two Suns

By Jonathan Shipley
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 2:22pm

If the debut is a hit — like Fur & Gold, which landed on more than its fair share of 2007 year-end lists — the second album is supposed to flop. Apparently, Natasha Khan didn’t get the memo about sophomore slumps — Two Suns (co-produced by Khan and Dave Kosten) is stronger than that acclaimed first disc.

“I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broadways I will seek him whom my soul loveth,” it begins with Khan’s ethereal voice evoking something long distant, dreamy, mystical. The quote is from “The Song Of Solomon,” which opens into a Björk-like fairyland of pulsing drums and crystalline bells. The song, like the 11 others on the album, explore dualities — two lovers, two planets, two sides to a personality.

“Siren Song” starts as a melancholic, piano-tinkled melody, the words expressing both her desire for closeness and an equal desire to destruct that closeness. It breaks into a ragged anthem as she howls, “I got so much wickedness.” The Tori Amos-esque “Moon On Moon,” a favorite during the Fur & Gold tour, is a beautiful lament about the distance of lovers and their struggles to reunite. The zenith of the album is the tremendous “Two Planets.” “I know stars will fall on me,” she sings sweetly amidst a jungle book of sound — percussion aplenty, hand claps, synthesizers. You sense it’s getting dark in that jungle, and the only torch you have is Khan’s voice.