Album Review: Bat For Lashes - 'Lost Girls'
It’s 80s noir, utterly splendid shades of rosy and sensory synth for decades as Bat For Lashes (Natasha Khan) releases her fifth record to date. Lost Girls (via AWAL Recordings) is split-second awe, sprawling city climbs in which all time stops still and those captured rush of bellied butterflies that flutter pre- top-of-hill elevation- nestled into one pulsated body of multi-disciplinary from an artist whose work is as ever expansive as the environment she works within.
Lost Girls, like a finely weaved, moonlight seeping lucent lace curtain, draws open to a visionary recorded collection of cooly cascading divine femininity of which, is endlessly looped to a sunset worthy soundtrack of internal nostalgia and heady exploration. Taking gratified bites from a screenplay Khan wrote post relocating from London to LA, it’s a world outside of female artistry normalities as it strives to rekindle the spark of ‘wide-eyed’, youthful encompassments with a touch of vampire girl-gang to the plushest degree of Spielberg.
With a consciousness of tactful grace that only comes to those who dare to adventure, opening track Kids In The Dark is a tenderly charged ballad of which is so satisfyingly filmy you can almost smell the winding twilight air bottled up inside. Feel For You, a jungled web of flickering echo has a caving pulsation reminiscent of sparkling water reverberating on-top of a near-submerged lo-fi speaker, trembles sprightly whilst Mountains perfectly balances the soaring impulsions with lulled mystique and is quite possibly the ultimate slow-burning, cinematic end track of our dreams.
Whilst Lost Girls is a largely collaborated playful effort in comparison to previous releases, Bat For Lashes has proved once again that she’s an undeniable stirring force to be reckoned with and this will carry us right through the turning of the seasons.
Words by Al Mills