“The Haunted Man” | Too formal and direct

Richard DiCicco
Staff Writer

Pop music figures like Bat For Lashes are rare. In my personally curated history of popular music, Bat For Lashes (or Natasha Khan) is directly preceded by Björk and Kate Bush. Likewise, critics most often compare her to these two groundbreaking female recording artists.

In her time, Kate Bush latched onto the psychedelic and post-punk reverberations of the early 1980s and married them with fanciful and energetic pop performances in a way that Madonna never could.

Just as well, in the 1990s, Björk set herself aside from her Lilith Fair contemporaries by eschewing folk-tinged coffee house balladry in favor of boisterous and sometimes sinister electronica, drawing from the rumbling DJ and dance scenes of the time.

Much like her chief inspiration, Björk shares Kate Bush’s impeccable pop sensibility and dramatic stage persona. And just like her artistic precedents, Bat For Lashes creates a world all her own, far away from the club-thumping diva personas listeners are spoon-fed on Top 40 radio.

On Natasha Khan’s last outing, 2009’s “Two Suns,” the young Englishwoman crafted compelling headphone candy that successfully blended folk, hip-hop and electronica. While her intimate lyricism draped the album in a certain mystery and drama, the best songs on “Two Suns” popped and crackled with a wide variety of instrumentation.

That aforementioned lineage of singular and visionary female pop artists is one that Bat For Lashes seems all too willing to elect herself into. While I consider Khan something of a student of Bush and Björk’s idiosyncratic styles, and I welcome with open arms any and all female solo artists willing to break the mold, something about Bat For Lashes’ latest LP, “The Haunted Man,” feels too formal.

Its textures are thin and its instrumentation is sparse even as Khan’s presence has become more powerful within her songs. The music sounds just as stark and black-and-white as the album cover.

Understandably, the goal of this year’s “The Haunted Man” is clearly to strip Bat For Lashes’ music down to its essential elements. This record is much less busy than Khan’s previous work and is effectively far more direct.

Each string arrangement, guitar strum and drum track is orchestrated to be as minimalistic as possible, looping in simple patterns that allow the vocals to take the lead. This has the great effect of pushing the listener even closer to Natasha, rendering the experience that much more intense and intimate.

However, it also gives the album a grey palette that rarely surprises or thrills. This never diminishes the strength of the songwriting, which is superb, slick and patient, but it affords the music a limited vocabulary to speak with. Restrictions in art should open up new unforeseen avenues of expression, not limit them to monotony.

On “The Haunted Man,” I found Khan aping her inspirations more than I would have liked. The lead single “Laura” is a potential Kate Bush deep cut if I’ve ever heard one, complete with pensive reverberating piano and plaintive singing.

But even when she wears her influences on her sleeve, Bat For Lashes is a fantastic songwriter who, in 2012, has better learned to pace herself. Even on a 50-minute LP, Khan retains your attention. Her expressly original cuts, especially the second single “All Your Gold,” are among the best songs I’ve heard all year.

But the album’s overall aesthetic is disenchanting and austere, devoid of the fireworks and spectacle that drew me to her music in the first place. By sweeping away the glitter and streamers, “The Haunted Man” merely leaves us with a cement floor.