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Bat for Lashes

Queen’s Hall

Four stars

 

“I feel emotional,” says Natasha Khan after reading If You Be the Universe, a poem dedicated to her daughter, towards the end of her Edinburgh International Festival show in her terminally spectral guise as Bat for Lashes. Khan may resemble a Victorian sprite in her ornate white dress, but it is motherhood that fired The Dream of Delphi, the first Bat for Lashes album since 2019, just as it becomes the primal drive behind much of Khan’s performance. 

 

Flanked by Laura Groves on keyboards and Charlotte Hatherley on guitar, Khan opens with an elaborate mime during the instrumental introduction to At Your Feet. The title track from the new album sees all three women offer up some kind of choreographed offering to some sacred deity on high.

 

Khan rewinds to 2019’s vampire girl gang opus, Lost Girls, for the nocturnal wanderings of The Hunger, perching on the edge of the stage for the big time sensuality of the piano led Mountains. She wields what appears to be some kind of divining rod for the spooky sensibilities of Sarah, and plays keyboards on Tahiti and the sublime Let’s Get Lost, co-written with Beck in 2010 for The Twilight Saga; Eclipse.

 

Khan’s palette veers between machine age melodrama, fizzy electronic bangers and the breathy intimacies of cut glass piano led art songs. The new material sounds weightier and more fleshed out than the album versions, with the entire set played at a delirious and poundingly loud degree. This peaks following Khan’s poem with the life-affirming embrace of Lillies, which sees her swoop and dip across the stage in a manner resembling a mini Martha Graham routine. 

 

Following a brooding Kids in the Dark, the encore opens with another poem before a closing rally beginning with All Your Gold and Wilderness. To end the evening, a divine Laura fuses all aspects of Khan's oeuvre, bridging light and shade as she keens to the cosmos until the end.


The Herald, August 26th 2024

 

Ends 

 

 

 

 

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