BAT FOR LASHESTwo Suns
(EMI)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)
Like Tori Amos, Natalie Merchant, Beyoncé, and Garth Brooks before her, Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan has many personas inside her, all of them battling for studio time. Her alter ego on Two Suns is a character named “Pearl,” a blonde, narcissistic femme fatale whose baneful presence emerges on tracks like “Siren Song” and “Pearl’s Dream,” battling for control of the album with the more mystical, earthy Natasha. (Natasha is the one who dedicates the album to “all the gracious muses and magicians” whose light she basked in “while this music was growing inside me.”)
I’m of two minds about this album. One part of me — oh, let’s call him “Sergio” — finds all this “duality of woman” stuff and the lyrics about “1,000 crystal towers in 100 emerald cities” pretentious and affected and spent much of the album rolling his eyes. But my other self — my true self — got so swept away by Khan’s rich, charismatic voice and her incense-in-the-nostrils Tori Amos atmospherics that Two Suns' lyrical shortcomings hardly seemed to matter. She’s a star, no doubt about it, and if she wants to claim there are two of her, so be it — maybe we can expect twice as many albums from her as her career develops.
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