Bat For Lashes’ Two Suns built a fantasy world of its own time and space

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Bat for Lashes Two Suns

In the endless debate over the best year for music, a new challenger has emerged: 2009. Admittedly, it might seem unlikely that, a decade from now, we’ll look back at that musical moment in the same way that we do with punk crashing the mainstream’s gates in 1977, or rock ‘n’ roll’s water supply being spiked with LSD in 1967, or hip-hop beginning its renaissance in 1998. But damn if it wasn’t a good year for indie rock.

Internet memes and retrospectives have looked back in awe since the 10-year anniversary of indie’s Last Great Year, which feels even more overwhelming in its offering of MVP Big Indie records than any other calendar year in the 21st century. Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors each vied for album- and song-of-the-year honors alongside seasoned major label graduates like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Phoenix dominated alternative radio with both “1901” and “Lisztomania,” The xx’s stellar debut began what ended up being an unceasing ascent, Japandroids sparked a fire for young hearts, and The Antlers broke them with a devastating but masterful saga about toxic relationships and terminal illness. Lifers such as Dinosaur Jr., Yo La Tengo and The Flaming Lips likewise got in on the act, and even well below the festival-headliner slots there was endless left-of-the-dial gold from the likes of Wild Beasts, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, The Horrors and so on. Curiously amid all this, Spoon somehow didn’t get in on the action, releasing Transference just one month late in January of 2010, but its weirdly stark and raw approach seemed to signal a shift away from the more baroque or psychedelic strains of 2009 anyhow. 

Yet the album from the Great Indie Summit of 2009 that holds up best for me is one that, arguably, isn’t even really indie by any reliable measurement: Bat for LashesTwo Suns. It was released via Parlophone in the UK, and Astralwerks in the U.S.—both sublabels beneath the umbrella of EMI. The sophomore album by British singer/songwriter Natasha Khan is also ambitious in a way that echoes ‘80s-era maximalists like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, shaking off any vestige of DIY in favor of art pop grandeur and detailed, elaborate production work. It’s not a humble record of scrappy underdog means, but rather one so grand in its mission that it builds its own bisolar system.

Khan aimed high earlier on, even when the budget or production wasn’t quite there to match it. Her 2006 debut album Fur and Gold is connected to Two Suns in ethos and aesthetic, its songs often feeling like rough drafts for what she’d eventually deliver on its follow-up. Only the single “What’s a Girl to Do?”, with its goth “Be My Baby” arrangement and cleverly creepy video, fully lived up to that potential, and it remains one of her best. 

With Two Suns, everything is bigger—in sound, in emotion, and certainly in its sci-fi concept involving parallel worlds, mirror personalities and cosmic scope. It’s a little hard to follow as a linear narrative, as concept albums often are. But then again, details like these aren’t really that important when it sounds this good. 

Bat for Lashes goes for broke in just the first song, “Glass,” a dramatic, triumphant opener that opens solely with Khan’s voice, echoing, synths beginning to crack the facade of silence like lightning in the distance of a pitch-black sky. She quotes the Bible’s Song of Solomon in her vision of a “knight in crystal armor,” his heart blinding in its brightness, over booming drums and eerie organ, rising in scale to a hugeness that her previous album only ever hinted at. This is how you open a record, a gambit so over-the-top that you risk the remainder of the album collapsing under its weight. That it not only doesn’t, but in fact arguably is outdone by at least one subsequent song, is a testament to the audacity that Khan was working with.

There’s not much that doesn’t sound immaculate here. “Sleep Alone” is masterful in its production and arrangement, layering throbbing, The Knife-like bass against acoustic guitar plucks, shaker, a cascade of synth arpeggios and dazzling interruptions of apparitional voices. The fragile “Moon & Moon” is a gorgeous, wintry piano waltz reminiscent of Tori Amos, whereas “Two Planets” explores the album’s thematic duality through a contradictory construction, relatively minimal in its individual parts, but its echoing drums and Khan’s reverb-heavy voice make it sound like it’s echoing across the galaxy.

Amid the conceptual threads that extend throughout the album, Khan introduces the character of “Pearl,” which represents a darker and more self-destructive version of herself. She’s the title character of “Pearl’s Dream,” a kind of goth/new wave pop single in which she expresses a yearning for freedom from a battle, a love affair, or perhaps both. But it’s “Siren Song” that feels more like a mission statement, a promise of loyalty to a lover until the siren song beckons her to follow. “My name is Pearl, and I love you the best way I know how,” she sings, holding up her brokenness to the light amid intensifying pounds of piano. 

While “Glass” sets a nigh-impossible high for the mystical sci-fi art-pop saga that unfolds, “Daniel” soars over it, a career-best single that simplifies Khan’s approach without sacrificing the haunting art-goth atmosphere. It’s the best song of 2009 by my measure (no disrespect to Animal Collective, “My Girls” is still great), a miracle of a new wave gem, all pizzicato strings and moody synths, and a chorus that could have been written in 1981 or 2009 or ten years from now. (And at times bears a passing resemblance to The Cure’s “A Forest,” reinforced by the fact that she covered that song around the same time.) Remarkably, on an album that frequently features some powerful drums, this is one of the rare moments where the programmed pulse that undergirds the song essentially remains unchanged—no point in overcrowding what’s already perfect. The Daniel in question is Daniel LaRusso, fictional protagonist of The Karate Kid, who is seen painted on Khan’s back on the single’s artwork. But it’s less a song about Ralph Macchio’s underdog fighter himself than a romantic reflection on young love and vulnerability: “Under a sheet of rain in my heart, Daniel/I dream of home.” 

Two Suns features a number of contributing musicians, including drummer Alex Thomas, who’s played with everyone from John Cale to Bolt Thrower, as well as Yeasayer’s Chris Keating and singer/songwriter Adem Ilhan, who apparently played wine glasses. Khan herself pulls a Prince here, credited with playing a dozen different instruments throughout Two Suns. But no guest leaves as much of a mark as Scott Walker, already more than a decade deep into his late-career avant garde renaissance, lending his eerie vocal presence to “The Big Sleep.” It’s a creepy skeleton of a song that closes the album on an eerie as hell but beautiful note, Walker’s haunted and otherworldly presence having more than a little to do with that. And where Two Suns blows open with gale force, it seems to end like a dying fire.

Each of Bat for Lashes’ albums since Two Suns has had a similar sense of self-contained thematic significance but few of them necessarily sound much alike—she’s not unlike PJ Harvey in that regard, another artist whose default mode is one of constant evolution. And while The Haunted Man perhaps comes closest, this is the album of Khan’s that seems to pack the biggest ideas into the most accessible package, which is perhaps one reason why I remain so enchanted by it. Much like a fictional TV backdrop that becomes a character of its own a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Sunnydale, the world that Khan builds in Two Suns is one that’s both thrilling and comforting to revisit, a fantastical autumnal wonderland.

Look, I was in my twenties in 2009, planning a wedding, and I devoured all of the albums I mentioned earlier. I saw a not-yet-famous St. Vincent play a matinee show in which I witnessed firsthand just how much Annie Clark could shred. I developed an unhealthy obsession with The Antlers’ Hospice, an album so emotionally devastating that I can barely bring myself to listen to it anymore. When I got married, we included Phoenix’s “1901” on the playlist; none of that year’s other Big Indie singles made it, but Cut Copy, LCD Soundsystem and The National did (though had we heard “Daniel” a little bit earlier, I’m pretty sure it would have made the cut, despite neither of us being named Daniel or having ever watched The Karate Kid together). And on our honeymoon in Barcelona, I bought a copy of The xx’s debut. 

A lot of that year’s records don’t hit me the same way now. The Big Pink didn’t turn out to be the next big thing as planned, I completely lost my ability to enjoy Dirty Projectors, and well, I already mentioned being permanently wounded by Hospice, right? But Two Suns isn’t trapped in its era, at times transparent about its ’80s-era influences but never bound by them (she’d save the nostalgia for 2019’s Lost Girls). Two Suns exists in a universe parallel to our own, turbulent and fantastical but uncorrupted by time.


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