Bat for Lashes | Two Suns

Astralwerks (2009)

By GUSTAVO TURNER | April 6, 2009

3.0 Stars

Natasha Khan became a sort of viral video sensation a couple of years ago with her inventive video for "What's a Girl To Do," where the decidedly twentysomething singer played a much younger girl taking a nocturnal bike ride through a surreal forest right out of Twin Peaks or Pola X.

Although Khan's neo-hippie garb and coy demeanor peg her as the British multicultural answer to fellow adulteen Joanna Newsom, her posh-nymphette-lost-in-a-faerie-grotto shtick has enough traction to turn fan and mentor Thom Yorke into Pedobear. (Her work, the panting head Radiohead has confessed, "seems to come from the world of Grimm's fairytales, and I feel like a wolf.")

Her new album as Bat for Lashes moves away from past Black Box Recorder influences and toward more-accessible piano ballads in the Kate Bush/Tori Amos tradition, but updated for a post–Kid A audience. Two Suns rarely ventures into anything truly experimental (her vocalizing is more Cranberries than Björk); when it does, as in the maelstromic beat of "Siren Song" or the Scott Walker cameo in album closer "The Big Sleep," it makes you curious as to what Khan could deliver if she weren't so committed to her "studenty" (in the UK sense) affectations.

BAT FOR LASHES + LEWIS & CLARKE | Paradise, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | April 27 @ 8 pm | $12 | 617.562.8800 or www.thedise.com

Related: Bat girl, Heat wave, Photos: Bat For Lashes at Paradise, More

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