Natasha Khan has always treated pop music like a spell. Her synth bass bites and sprinklings of imaginative lyrics create an unmistakable glow. Over nearly 20 years performing as Bat for Lashes, the singer-songwriter has become an expert dreamer – her latest album, 2019 Lost Girls, was written from the perspective of an all-female biker gang — and its theatricality has drawn frequent comparisons to Kate Bush. Then in 2020, Khan had a baby. Her body became impossible to ignore and its tenderness inspired her latest album. Dedicated to and named after Khan's daughter, The Delphic dream it offers many fascinating experiments bordering on the environment – until its charm fades like a half-formed afterthought.
To continue the Kate Bush comparisons, The dream of Delphi it is Khan's Aerial. Like that 2005 album, in which a typically enigmatic Bush describes her son as sunshine, The dream of Delphi sees Khan trade in personal sensuality—the wild horses and wailing kisses of previous albums—for earthier musings. The dream It often sounds like a stripped-down version of Khan's discography, taking her favorite strings, 80's sappy synths and shell drums and chopping them into translucent slugs. The instrumental “Breaking Up” slowly twitches, like many of Khan's bittersweet pop songs, with a commanding synth-bassline that rumbles like an empty stomach. Harpist Mary Lattimore circulates starfish on the title track, matching Bat for Lashes' tendency to use strings as a sweetener. Khan sings hypnotically of “milk and opal light.” It's all pretty, but compared to her more hearty recipes, it lacks protein.
Khan is an effective maximalist when she allows it, immersing everything in cascades—every second has to be a cascade or a bust. The push to make things bigger translates well to the melodic ambient music that makes up the bulk of it The dream, so songs like “The Midwives Have Left” have wonderful balloon-like buoyancy. Khan's raspy voice thins as she sinks into weightless hum, nested in piano shards. These moments are some of the album's most moving. they remember the best experimental motherhood music like Marrow by Björk. Some of the songs The dream of Delphi they are more or less underdeveloped and end up dispersing into the air. But it's Khan's lyrics, ever so full of weight and grace, that keep the album from lagging. “Remember you came from a spiral, unfurling,” Khan sings on “Letter to My Daughter” with its measured take on motherhood. In this music, motherhood sounds as supernatural as it feels to the people experiencing it.
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