It was tough to gauge Natasha Khan back in 2006 when her Bat for Lashes identity gained notice for a debut single and LP. “What’s a Girl to Do?” was great, the full-length Fur and Gold not so much in consistency, and yet I didn’t quite know what to make of her. Whether or not her persona was the real deal or an aesthete gliding through the motions, it worked, and I didn’t really care which was the truth—either answer would have deflated some of her allure. But Two Suns doesn’t simply dodge the question, but adds new puzzlements to the enigma. Sure, the prowess is still there, but what we get is less absorbing than what the realists could expect and nothing on here matches “Girl.” Worse still, with a more streamlined and electronic-driven sound, a lot of her quirky charisma is drained away. The sounds-worse-than-it-is-caveat: there’s still enough here to not send fans spinning furiously for the real deal.
Entering on flowering majesty, she sets a magnetic tone on “Glass” with a polyrhythmic drum gallop and a voice that draws you in hypnotically before soaring to the stars. She summons a fantastical image, one of both fragility and epic scope. “Went over the sea, what did I find?/A thousand crystal towers, a hundred emerald cities/And the hand of the watchman in the night sky/Points to my beloved, a knight in crystal armor.” These pieces serve solely for mood, detailing no discernible tale, but as poetry, they’d be clunky in any other setting. The exotic flavor of her voice transforms phrases that only the cult-adoring could love into simple passages that wander and spike in the midst of the cloudy compositions.
She’s not always looking up into the mystical. “Daniel” is a more earthbound piece—folktronica, even—one haunted by echoes and punched up by a predictable synth beat. It’s catchy but doesn’t linger. But when she plants her feet firmly to the earth, she seems lost. A twanging, tuneless guitar scrapes the ears at “Peace of Mind”’s outset and the back-ups seem to lean at bluegrass gospel. In the middle of the album, it’s too cluttered to thrive on its own and too different to do anything more substantial than break the spell she had cast up to that point. She even attempts to turn a love song of sorts into some kind of epic, unearthly battle, singing, “Lover, when you don’t lay with me/I’m a huntress for a husband lost at sea.” But she doesn’t shy from rustic seduction: “Where’s my bear to lick me clean/Feed my soul milk and honey.” That one, “Moon and Moon,” even features back-up vocals that are implanted along with tape recorder hiss, but the pristinely somber piano melody gets poked hard by such an overtly DIY move.
Save for the eerily overwrought “Two Planets,” which still latches to your primal state of mind, not much on the home stretch is laudatory. Instead we get silly lines like “But I need sorrow, baby, life’s sorrow is the drug” on the meandering “Good Love” and an overly precious and stagy curtain closer in “The Big Sleep.” The latter is particularly tragic since Scott Walker warbles solemnly as companion, but the tempo is languorous to the point of sedation. They brood, mourn and swoon for little to no impact. It ends with an electronic static pulse awaiting Trent Reznor to bash some skulls; I kinda wish he had.
Taking a cue from Chris Gaines, Georgie Fruit, et al, Khan invents her own alter ego here, though it doesn’t seem to arise from any reach for catharsis. Instead, it seems to just be a character she finds fascinating, a beguiling blond maneater. Since the idea is neither well-integrated nor enriching to the audience, it never really works. It’s a surprise, then, that Pearl features in one of the album’s best tracks, the archly dramatic centerpiece, “Siren Song.” Pearl is a force of nature, so it’s fitting that one of her starring roles is in a song that expresses a thunderstorm with percussion that rattles before crashing and a piano pounded into ivory shards. Not a mere explosive showcase, either; it earns its apocalyptic climax.
Two Suns is marginally about a duality, often in the double-sided nature of each song’s imagery and the partnership between Khan and Pearl. On “Two Planets,” she wonders about how “life is so much dark and light…day cannot exist without a night.” Sometimes the duality might just refer to homophones—she gets a lot of mileage out of trade-offs between knight/night, sun/son, etc. But there’s not enough of that two-face treatment to the music itself. When she tries something different on “Peace of Mind,” it’s a speed bump. Really, she’s at her best when she goes for broke and melds everything she can find on the countertop, as evinced by the showstoppers “Glass” and “Siren Song.” The album is itself of two images, one that presents both a dazzlingly hungry artist and one that tumbles into the pitfalls of any ordinary witchy hippie without a point beyond being off-kilter. Never tough to bear, the quality flips back and forth as well. Some songs are good and others aren’t; the balance depends on your tolerance for the fracture between exhilaration and doldrums.
