Concert Review: Bat For Lashes, Scala, King’s Cross

By Robert Bain
(Wednesday 6 December 2006)

Natasha Khan doesn’t do things by halves. Before her on-stage persona, Bat For Lashes, even appears, the stage has been adorned with candles, fairy lights and dry ice. Khan and her three female bandmates emerge dressed in swathes of cloth with gold hairbands, glitter on their faces for good measure.

At this point the show could go one of two ways. If the songs hold up, this handful of wannabe fairy queens will have succeeded in creating an ethereal air of mystery and wonder. If the songs falter, they’re going to look like a school art project that’s been allowed to go too far.

Happily, the songs rarely falter. Khan enthusiastically waves a shaker and tambourine throughout the foot-tapping first song, “Trophy”. Her smooth voice goes effortlessly from a whisper to a wail, and for such a gaudy act, her singing style is surprisingly natural, with none of the affectations and Americanisms that so many singers fall back on.

It’s quickly clear that there is real substance behind Bat For Lashes’ style – this stage is dripping with talent as well as fairy lights. Not only are Khan and her three companions all unfeasibly beautiful, they can also apparently play any instrument you put in front of them. Throughout the set they switch casually between pianos, zithers, drums, bells, guitars, violins and instruments I don’t even know the names of.

And despite all the artifice, they aren’t afraid to show how much fun they’re having. All four wear smiles for much of the show, and make no effort to hide the beer cans they swig from.

The dreamy songs are in contrast to Khan’s down-to-earth stage manner. She’s like an excited child, laughing and chatting with the audience. She encourages us to help provide the birdsong that kicks off one of the numbers, and conjures up a variety of props for other sound effects.

But these aren’t just kids who’ve raided the toy box – every little jingle of a bell or bang of a stick finds its place perfectly in the intricate, carefully crafted songs. The highlight is “Horse and I”, which grabs your attention with a stirring harpsichord riff then whisks you off with an ominous, shuffling drumbeat to a finale of strings and harmonies. Khan takes a seat at the piano for the downtempo songs – including a well received cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”.

Bat For Lashes’ lyrics take us to a lavish dreamworld full of, well, all the things you’d expect in a lavish dreamworld: unicorns, wizards, pagan rituals in misty forests, that sort of thing. All this willful weirdness draws obvious comparisons with the likes of Kate Bush, Björk and Cat Power. So while she might not be as original as she’d like to be, Bat For Lashes certainly does what she does unusually well.

The theatrical style permeates Khan’s look and sound, and is obviously what she wants Bat For Lashes to be all about, but some of the most powerful lyrical moments come from throwaway details of ordinary life, as in “Sad Eyes” and “Prescilla”.

Luckily Bat For Lashes knows as well as we do that it’s not the glitter and hairbands but the tunes that really get the crowd lost in her magical world. Then, much too soon, the short set ends, the lights go up and we’re all back in London. Damn.