Golden echoes on dark sounds
“Never see a big church steeple when I call you on the phone” from the song All your gold. Natasha Kahn draw this way her personal trip from the golden side of love to the contradiction between a relationship and the personal development. And she’s done it with a new album, a new step of her artistic project Bat for lashes. The album is titled The haunted man (Parlophone, 2012) and it has counted with a magnificent introduction by the single Laura. “When your smile is so wide and your heels are so high you can’t cry, get your glad rags on and let’s sing along to that lonely song”. She always walks along the thin line between chaos and harmony, conscious that in life brightness is nothing more than an illusion. And that could be the perfect description of the creation process of the album because Natasha went into a creative collapse after the tour of presentation of her second album Two suns released in 2009. Fortunately, she started to write again composing the opening track of what has become her latest album. That song titled Lilies has an opening verse that describes perfectly her feelings in front that creative collapse. “Again tonight I sang a song, a prayer if you will”. She created that song inspired by the movie Ryan’s daughter directed by Davin Lean in 1970, the story of Rosy Ryan who is bored with her humdrum life in an isolated village and fantasizes about the outside world. The haunted man is in the end a confident album, full of hope born in the darkness, the portrait of a spirit that looks for ways to create the personal light.
Now Bat for lashes is on tour to present that musical confidence faithful to the sound she has been developing from her first album Fur and gold released in 2006. So we’ll get the chance to discover if that invitation to get into her personal world is deep enough or just an artistic way to get her own escape from the past collapse leaving us at doors of the real Natasha.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo courtesy of Live Nation
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