Nightmares Come And They Don’t Go

Bat for Lashes @ Music Hall of Williamsburg 6/2/2016
I Do / Joe’s Dream / In God’s House / Honeymooning Alone / Sunday Love / Never Forgive the Angels / Close Encounters / If I Knew / I Will Love Again // Laura / We’ve Only Just Begun / What’s A Girl to Do? / Horse & I / Marilyn / Sleep Alone / Daniel

Natasha Khan is one of the world’s best living singers, and as beautiful as her voice is on record, you need to witness her sing in person to fully understand that. Her technical skill is extraordinary; her control over her voice is so precise yet totally natural that it can seem unreal. But the technical qualities of her singing are trumped by the soul and overwhelming emotion in her voice, and how it’s all at the service of Khan’s hyper-romantic songs. Khan is fascinated by love and romance, nearly her entire body of work is focused on variations on this theme. And it’s never mundane. Her songs are rooted in the details of common life, but the romance is heightened and melodramatic in a way that often feels mythic. Khan sings about idealized passion and grand love, and when she sings of pain and failure, it’s always a tragedy. Listening to the records gets this across, but there is a fussiness to the production that can obscure the intensity and presence of her performances. Seeing her live, there’s no ignoring the stakes of her music, or how much of her body and soul she puts into the songs. There’s no half measures here.

Bat for Lashes “Never Forgive the Angels”

The Bride is about a woman who is struggling with the sudden loss of the man she was about to marry. You hear her move through different stages of grief in the tracks just before “Never Forgive the Angels” – she’s in denial, she runs away – but this is the song where the reality of his death fully sets in. It’s a nightmare that does not end, and she sounds truly broken by understanding the permanence of it all. The aspect of grief that this captures so well is the feeling that your own life cannot move beyond this horrible thing, like there’s this block you can’t move beyond and you’re doomed to be stuck in this moment forever. Even as the song builds towards a catharsis, it feels cold and still. And that catharsis isn’t so much about letting the feeling go so much as exhausting it for the time being.

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