Thesedays a girl only has to be using words of more than two syllables to warrant a comparison to Kate Bush. And if she also happens to be within spitting distance
of a piano her career is as good as finished. And whilst it would be misleading
to suggest that the likes of Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan might have faired
better in life had they been turning tricks on Boogie Street for the last twenty
years, you can’t help but feel the comparison has become something of a cross
to bear. It’s a ‘Kate 22’ situation: yell and they call you a slapper, whisper
and they don’t call you at all. It’s not what Katie did exactly, more what continued
to be done in Katie’s name. And you can’t help but feel that ‘Two Suns’ – the
sumptuous, widescreen follow-up to Khan’s Mercury nominated ‘Fur and Gold’ debut
album – virtually grabs us by the lapels, shoves a screwed-up copy of ‘Hounds
of Love’ sheet-music down our scrawny little throats and demands that we make
the comparison.
So yes, she sounds like Kate Bush. Nuff said. But had it not been for the album’s
lavish 80s sheen and exceptionally grand production credits, you’d have to say
that Brighton’s Bat For Lashes had more in common with unmanageable
old auteurs like John Cale and Scott Walker than anyone quite so lovely as Kate.
But where are we going with all this crazy eighties retro malarkey? Few artists
have yet got the balance right. MGMT, Empire of the Sun and now even Lily ‘bloody’
Allen drag their gear stick into reverse, check their rear-view mirror and accelerate
none too gently into a stack of Amiga 500 computers and Thomas Dolby records.
It’s like driving in a hall of mirrors. It’s fun, I suppose, perhaps even queerly
entertaining for those of us who remember the outrageous frilly pomp of it all
the first time around, but should a writer as plainly gifted as Khan be propping
up her sophomore release with such a cynical marketing ploy?
So where does it all go wrong? Well first off, it’s excessively wordy. It also
buckles beneath the weight of its own terrifically bloated metaphysical ideas
and conceits. At a time when most punters are grappling with the internal contradictions
of not heaving up a kebab after a night out getting pissed, Khan tackles duality
and the philosophy of the self in a manner that would even have the likes of
Jacques Derrida fumbling for his Nintendo Wii. Knights in Crystal Armour? Flames
falling into orbit? Meaning through contradiction and heroic concepts like ‘différance’
are one thing, but dungeon and dragon imagery and quasi-religious nonsense like
that characterising ‘Glass’ and ‘Moon and Moon’ recall the cod-elegant hocus-pocus
and decadent europhilia of JG Ballard and the lyrical flamboyance of Simon le
Bon. “Out on the tar planes, the glides are moving” they sang on the
‘The Chauffeur’; it wasn’t profound, it was a traffic update. They were talking
about cars on roads.
‘Two Suns’ does have its successes. New single, ‘Daniel’ (swamped in reverb
as thick and as wet as sea-fret) travels breathlessly and gorgeously enough,
the song’s pizzicato strings popping puckishly around Khan’s frosty vocals.
And ‘Good Love’ even resurrects the pouting, gothic Spector-Pop of ‘Fur and
Gold’s ‘What’s A Girl To Do?’ Oh and there’s a surprising (if disappointing)
cameo from Secretary of Stateliness, Scott Walker on torch song, ‘The Big Sleep’.
What else can I say? The eighties never sounded so good. Or so very 1980s.
