Bat for Lashes - The Bride

The Guardian 80

(Parlophone)

Related: Bat For Lashes: 'Even in Sex And The City, the single girls end up with someone'

As Natasha Khan has made known in interviews, press releases and live shows, her fourth album as Bat for Lashes has a concept. It revolves around a woman whose fiancé dies on his way to their wedding, and her subsequent experiences of life after love. In song-title terms, it’s a journey that takes us from the hopeful I Do, to Honeymooning Alone and, later, I Will Love Again. Whether it’s a great idea to impose such an involved narrative on an album of torch songs seems doubtful, especially since their appeal is always fortified by elastic meaning. What’s less questionable is the quality of the music itself. Barring Sunday Love – an electropop episode that movingly echoes the melody of Khan’s best-known track, Daniel – this is a collection of darkly intriguing dirges, a battle for dominance between Khan’s intimate, exquisitely beautiful vocal and subtly unnerving sonic dissonance at its heart.

Drowned In Sound 60

And hey, The Bride is quite the journey, from the title character's widowing at the wedding alter to the honeymoon car speeding down the highway, "yellow lines like veins" and "white veil thrashing in the wind", the passenger seat’s red leather "cold as a March rain" as Chapter One - that’s right, there’s an actual written story that goes with this - puts it. There’s "pretty girls" with teary eyes, statues that peer on pityingly and ghosts that hover as green lights, car crashes and spectrophilia and emotive third-act redemption - the whole project’s pretty much a York Notes of gothic noir plot devices, replete with love letters and newspaper clippings and ‘air fresheners from The Bride’s car’ for those poring through the special edition.

And yet for all this effort the album itself is at times curiously empty, both overblown and underwhelming, with loads of smoke but not much atmosphere. Taking its cue from The Haunted Man the arrangements are generally stripped-back and sparing, the focus thrown onto Khan’s (still incredible) voice rather than on the kinetic, driving rhythms that characterise her earlier work - certainly there’s no ‘Daniel’ here, no ‘Glass’ or ‘Trophy’ or climactic, epic ‘Two Planets’, all pagan drums and sweat-soaked ritual. For that you’d have to look to last year’s Sexwitch EP with its wild, untrammeled id and heady lust: by contrast The Bride seems pretty chaste.

Well, almost - there is one song where the protagonist fucks the ghost of her dead fiancee - but for an album with such narrative scope this ‘classic road trip through the heart’ rarely leaves the sonic A-roads. Opener ‘I Do’ sets the tone and indeed the scene, low-key and pretty but with a forebode of menace as the Bride anticipates her groom: ‘All of the sorrow will drop away’, Khan sings, and it’s sweet but inessential, a prologue soon forgotten. ‘Joe’s Dream’ is much stronger, thunder rolling behind moody chords and spectral wailing, dark but danceable in the best Bat for Lashes tradition, whilst ‘Sunday Love’ is pleasingly frantic, a fever of beats and bass and stabbing synths. Elsewhere ‘Honeymooning Alone’ shivers with dusty guitar and Portishead rhythms, whilst closing bonus track ‘Clouds’ is wonderfully haunting, building from its sinister guitar chime to a dramatic, cathartic fade.

They’re the highpoints - and to be fair they are pretty high. But they’re offset by a ream of songs - ‘Never Forgive The Angels’, ‘Land’s End’, ‘If I Knew’ - that don’t really do a whole lot, passing by in a wash of minimal instrumentation and fey lyricism that’s neither fragile enough to be truly affecting nor gripping enough to justify the runtime. Worst is ‘Widow’s Peak’, a mid-album descent into spoken-word that still, 23 plays later, has me laughing actually out loud at its sheer staggering pretension, its crystal skull cod-mysticism and overblown, sixth-form drama student delivery, but mostly - mostly - at its rhyming couplets.

Oh, the rhyming couplets.

"Don’t wake me up too soon/there’s a halo on the moon". "You hunger, I’ll thirst/pink stars do burst". "You’re my blood, you’re my wine/you’re my mountain to climb/say you’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine" And, later, at the album’s peak moment, its stirring emotional crescendo in ‘I Will Love Again: "I will turn it back around/I’ll be homeward bound", repeated over and over until The Gruffalo starts to seem like high art, like fucking Chaucer in comparison.

Sure, loads of great albums have shocking lyrics, but they’re especially noticeable here - pretty much lit up in burning neon - on songs that place them centre-forward with everything else turned down. And yeah, it might all be being presented in character - a useful conceit as no real person could get away with singing this stuff - but that doesn’t really excuse it, doesn’t make it any less disappointing when the string arrangements are cut into so jarringly with lines that provoke a physical wince.

But hey, it’s still better being in Khan’s world than ours right now, speeding away from the tears and the tragedy in an old car towards the sea. Maybe shocking rhymes are what we need right now - a salve against the awful realities outside our headphones, the racists on our streets and the morons jostling to marshall them. It’s a shame though that fourth time around it’s not quite such a compelling place to be, and not strong enough to keep the real world out.

The Guardian 60

(Parlophone)

Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan returns in very different garb for her fourth album, swapping black ceremonial robes for white. Last heard ululating on 2015’s highly entertaining psych-rock side project, Sexwitch, this latest album opens with Disney arpeggios and girly conventions on romantic love, with a bride-to-be imagining her happily-ever-after as a kind of rebirth.

Previewing this concept album with a series of gigs in churches dressed all in white, Khan has a more tragic and complex story to tell, however. The album’s standout track, In God’s House, is all ominous electronics, Khan’s otherworldly voice run through with premonition. This bride will be jilted at the altar when her beau is killed in a traffic accident on his way to the wedding. Cue dashed hopes, wilted flowers, epic panda eyes.