With a background that features going to high-level squash matches featuring members of her family, including her uncle Jahinger Khan, considered by many to be the greatest squash player of all time, Natasha Khan nurtured an interest in the ceremonial and ritualistic that was a feature of these matches, but which she utilised for creative purposes; her need to thrive on heightened communal experiences, in the live arena. In addition, as half-Pakastani, she suffered some bullying and abuse at school, turned her attentions to the piano and writing songs, and started creating imaginary worlds.

The Bride, her fourth album, like her Mercury-nominated second album Two Suns, is a concept, based on an imaginary wedding, the love and romance associated with that, and all the trials, tribulations, tragedies and torments that can go hand-in-hand. Moreover, it was inspired by her reworking of a pre-revolution Iranian song, itself called ‘The Bride’, which she had made with the band Toy, just prior to working with them and Dan Carey on the Sexwitch project, and which resulted in a six-track mini-album of psyche-folk cover versions of songs from around the globe.

Two Suns explored dualities and connections, on the human and interplanetary level, between love and pain, chaos and order, via the duality of a created alter-ego, and the more spiritual Khan herself. Similarly The Bride sees Khan take on the role of a bride in exploring similar ideas, wrapped up in stories of anticipation, romance, tragedy, death, dreams and celebration. Appropriately enough, The Bride begins with ‘I Do’ (the first song released from the album, and which was accompanied by a picture of a wedding invitation), just her voice and autoharp: "Tomorrow you will take me as your bride, and all the grey skies will blow away," she sings optimistically, the future seemingly rosy and fine. But storm clouds start to gather on ‘Joe's Dream (Don't Say Goodbye)’, Khan's Bjorkesque vocal depicting doubts amidst the gloomy musical backdrop: “Lays his hand gently to my face / Through the promise of wedding lace / And I feel his dark embrace / As my baby, he cries / I'm falling in love (Don't say goodbye)." And then on the darkly electro-pulsing ‘In God's House’, with Khan waiting at the altar, she has visions of a tragedy. He's dead, as can be heard via the sound of a car crash at the beginning of ‘Honeymooning Alone’, followed by marching-style drums, a whiff of late 60s Jefferson Airplane dark-psyche in the air. And so the mourning begins, and the emotional outpouring deepens.

But it's not all bleak. On ‘Sunday Love’, we get some welcome, if a little incongruous, head nodding and glitchy Stereolab/Neu! inspired grooves. Married to an indeterminate lyric, it's infectious and rather uplifting, before returning to the desolate textures and incessantly bassy piano notes of the lamentful ‘Never Forgive The Angels’, and the string-laden, emotionally charged ‘Close Encounters’, a song about sexual communion with the dead (as Khan said recently on stage, to much laughter in Brighton, when introducing the song).

Further on in The Bride, Khan continues to wrestle with her emotional displacement, this sudden change in fortunes, such as on the spoken word ‘Widow's Peak’: "Here angels conspire, and angels do drown / I'm lost in the mire, upside down / Is that my soul on fire, whirling by?" slowly but surely coming to grips with life's ongoing tendencies to throw a curveball or two. By the time we get to the stripped back balladry of ‘If I Knew’, ‘I Will Love Again’, and ‘In Your Bed’, her soul is let free and her spirit can fly again. "I know that you came at the perfect time, there was a mountain that I had to claim as mine / and you brought every weather from storm to shine / I'm thankful you held me fine."

Like The Haunted Man, her previous album as Bat For Lashes, Khan has largely stripped back the music, but is still concerned with crafting the atmospheric dream-worlds of her earlier work, in finding some emotional truth in these essentially uncomplicated compositions. And by creating a world that speaks of her desires and dreams, mixed in with the trials and tribulations that are an inevitable part of human existence, Khan has crafted an exquisite work of real beauty and ultimately, visceral humanity.
Jeff Hemmings

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