By Natalie Schack, News Correspondent

Listening to Two Suns, Bat for Lashes’ second studio album, conjures many feelings. It’s walking through the forest in the dark with every folktale and legend you’ve ever heard haunting your mind. It’s being locked in the costume department of the Globe Theater overnight, spools of velvet and impossibly puffed sleeves drowning you in dust. It’s New York, circa 1985; it’s the English countryside at dusk.
Natasha Khan, also known as Bat for Lashes, slipped onto the scene in 2006 with her debut album Fur and Gold. Her samples, ‘The Bat’s Mouth’ and ‘Trophy,’ were dark, ambient, seducing songs, so much so that the urge to purchase her entire CD through a potentially disreputable website was uncontrollable.
Now, Khan’s music is sold on iTunes, Thom Yorke of Radiohead is a fan, she’s getting press from Rolling Stone and Fader and Kanye West is blogging enthusiastically about her music videos. Needless to say, Khan has arrived.
She returns with a new love, a new life, a new city, and a new album ‘- written from the point of view of a new persona. Khan calls this persona Pearl, a blond-wigged bad girl who provides the hard-edged urban foil to Khan’s earthy self.
The album retains the theatrical air of Fur and Gold, with each song unwrapping like another act in some grand glittery play of fairies, monsters, castles and true love. Her lyrics are still more like poems, eerie and thick with imagery you’d find in the head of a little girl. Metaphor upon metaphor builds, and her stories are more like fables than anything else.
In the opening song ‘Glass,’ Khan implores, ‘What did I find? / A thousand crystal towers. / A hundred emerald cities. / And the hand of the watchmen / in the night sky / points to my beloved / a knight in crystal armor.’
Not enough fairy tale imagery? There is also a ‘Cloak of red and green,’ ‘Heavenly spirits,’ a ‘Blinding mirror,’ rainbows and diamonds. And that’s only in the first five minutes of the album.
Sometimes all the crystal this and golden that can get a little oppressive, and the glittery symbolism begins to feel a bit shtick-y, sacrificing relatability for baroque imagery. One gets the impression of being trapped in some twisted children’s book.
Some pieces leave the listener with an uncanny feeling that there’s a missing element, and Khan’s eerie dissonance that at some times adds to the ambience can lend an unfinished and clumsy air to the piece.
But for the most part, Khan’s imagination and the range of her musical influence is at best riveting, and at worst intriguing. She goes from ’80s-esque synthesizers in ‘Pearl’s Dream’ to moody southern-y choirs in ‘Peace of Mind.’
If I’d heard ‘Two Planets’ by itself, I would have sworn it was Bjork. Organs and harps, percussion that hangs heavy, and glassy, sounds from some indeterminable source create a palate of Khan’s characteristic penchant for experimentation and often build into downright breathtaking crescendos.
Khan has grown by leaps with Two Suns, and if nothing else it is a testimony of her unflinching dedication to the fantastical and the beautiful, evidence of her continual exploration of music as scene, and metaphor as story.
Her foray into terrain without genre defies pigeonholing, instead adorning itself with a collage of instruments and styles torn from a variety of decades and cultures.
Two Suns is the next step in Khan’s musical growth, a potent, ironic mixture of rock candy and rock salt that turns to glass in your mouth. And if this is where Khan is now, there’s no telling what her future will hold ‘- but let’s take a wild guess and assume it will include a fairy tale forest or two.
A free Tara Bush remix of Two Suns’ first single ‘Daniel’ is available at batforlashes.com. Khan also made a remix of the incredible ‘Use Somebody’ by Kings of Leon. It’s not as good as the original, but her melancholy vocals and minimalist organ instrumentals lend an interesting new sound to the song.