From the opening track of Natasha Kahn’s new album the conflict within is apparent. The words “A thousand crystal towers/A hundred emerald cities” are the sort of fantastically weird lyrics you’d expect to find in the most wilfully obscure pysch-folk song. Here though, even though the soundscape is built from various unplaceable and unusual sounds, the heavy tribal drums are undeniably funky. When the chorus crashes down on you the difference between Bat for Lashes first and second album becomes apparent, that difference is pop.
Kahn’s first album, Fur and Gold, was somewhat surprisingly beaten to the Mercury prize by Klaxons Myths of the Near Future. Fur and Gold was a confident and accomplished debut, full of metaphor and strange narrative. Although some of that did make the album fairly inaccessible. In Two Suns, gone for the most part is the spoken word and some of the mysticism. Two Suns is a rare case of a small injection of pop doing some real good to the music.
Lead single Daniel has been all over the interwebs for a few months and it got bloggers and bloggees very excited. The effortlessly catchy hook meant it was posted and re-posted. The thoughts were that if this was the direction she was going in there’d be major, and possibly mainstream, success waiting for Natasha Kahn.
To some extent this seems likely, but Two Suns is not without its faults. Ethereally obscure music can be admirable, but if it fails to connect on an emotional level then people simply won’t listen to it. On Good Love Kahn tells us in slow deliberate spoken word, “I drove past true love once, in a dream/Like a house that caught fire, it burned and flamed/Then the magician disappeared/As quickly as he came.” Poetic perhaps, but it does err on the side of parody. Throw in a moaning organ as backing music and she’s certainly lost at least this reviewer.
Kahn’s voice has always had a lovely quality of a kind of longing to it. When put to work on wilfully sad songs, like her previous album’s Sad Eyes, or Two Sun’s The Big Sleep, the effect is a calculated and powerful melancholy. On Pearl’s Dream though, it is set it loose on the dance-beats provided by Yeasayer’s Chris Keating. That undeniable aching in her voice lends the song a serious edge, so when they rock out with the synths it’s not too funked up.
It’s a shame to revel in an experimentally exciting artist being reigned in and perhaps a little tamed. Obscurity does not correlate with a lack of quality, and accessible frequently holds hands with the shit. Yet with her instinct for impenetrable physch-folk being directed down a path that is frankly a lot more fun, far more people will be interested in the music she’s making. That path is of course fraught with danger. Any further down the pop road and the magical metaphors will be mightily misplaced. Two Suns though, is still a wonderful balance of the two disciplines and overall a great addition to the recently barren stable of physch-pop.
