Album Review: Bat For Lashes, The Bride

It’s hard to believe we’ve had to wait this long for a Bat For Lashes concept album told from the perspective of a fiancé whose husband-to-be is killed in a car crash en route to the altar. But it’s true – after 2013’s eager-to-please, commercially unsuccessfully The Haunted Man, Natasha Khan has at last embraced what we might have assumed all along to be her true calling of long-form musical storytelling.
Before going further, it might be useful to acknowledge what The Bride isn’t. It contains not a whisper of mainstream ambition: those pining for the twinkling goth-pop of ‘Daniel’ and ‘All Your Gold’, Khan’s most complete songs, will be underwhelmed and possibly baffled.
Nor does The Bride shed light on her political views, which this month saw her apparently declare for Team Boris in the Brexit debate (“I do believe the breakdown of the EU, whether I agree with it or not, is a symptom of a greater breakdown,” she told Rolling Stone. “Although it’s painful for us in the near future, including for artists and musicians, I somehow have the sense it needs to happen to revolutionise the structures on which we build our society”).
Instead, The Bride is steeped in mystery, Khan an unfathomable narrator at the centre of murk. A crepuscular electro-beat underpins ‘In God’s House’; otherwise this is a ballad-dominated collection, which yields up its pleasure with considerable diffidence. Good news if you always preferred the Natasha Khan sobbing through ‘Laura’ over the hoodied weirdo channelling Fleetwood Mac – but a disappointment for the rest of us.
Still, taken in isolation, The Bride is frequently bewitching – properly bonkers, too, with Khan delivering a tingle-inducing piece of spoken word on ‘Widow’s Peak’ (There’s a demon here... I can’t get home, I can’t get home,” she whimpers theatrically) and coming on like a funereal Lana Del Rey on ‘I Will Love Again’ and ‘Joe’s Dream’ (named for the fictional dead groom).
Yes, The Bride is endlessly bleak and might be accused of being po-faced. But how encouraging in 2016 that a major label artist is prepared to risk alienating her fanbase with a daft and deeply inscrutable curio. I don’t know if I enjoyed The Bride especially, but I’m glad it exists – if only because, with it out of her system, Khan might at last get around to making the straight-up mega pop record she surely has in her.

Bat For Lashes, The Bride is out now!