Natasha Kahn, aka Bat For Lashes, had never made us wait so long for a record. In fact, we listened to her for the last time in 2019, when “Lost Girl” returned to project her music towards a more rounded and complete song form and sounds programmatically aimed at the 80s. A direction that this “The Dream Of Delphi” he seems to completely refuse, absorbed in a spiritual (almost) absence of heartbeats and turned completely towards the inner world of the artist of Anglo-Kazakh descent.
And it couldn’t be otherwise, because Nat is no longer who she used to be, as she herself reiterated in several interviews prior to the launch of this sixth album. Taking place in California in 2020, the birth of her daughter Delphi (hence the title of the album) changed everything for Kahn, who embraced motherhood so viscerally that she experienced it as a sort of rebirth in new guises – those, precisely , of mother.
“The Dream Of Delphi” is in all respects a dream designed by Bat For Lashes: a dream of the daughter, a dream for the daughter. Babbling, dilated rhythms, string laments, pastoral glimpses are the founding elements of his most abstract album ever.
However, light years away from the BFL factory pop songs we are used to, with its insistent synthesizer arpeggio and the snapping rhythm that tears the song in half like a sort of synthetic sun, the opening track (and which gives the album its title) it is in fact an object as valuable as it is deceptive. In fact, we will have to wait four songs to meet the next (and only other) song, the engaging single (“Home”).
In the middle and after all sorts of dilations (“Christmas Day”), romantic escapes on the piano towards an engaging ethereal finale (the marvelous “At Your Feet”), synthetic sorties with oriental aromas inclined towards the new age (“Breaking Up” , Delphi Dancing”).
Even when the words are few and completely absent, the titles of the songs suggest a sort of emotional diary of the days of pregnancy and the first years of little Delphi’s life (“The Midwives Has Left”, “Her Fisrt Morning”.
It’s a record unlike anything Bat For Lashes has played before “The Dream Of Delphi”. And it couldn’t be otherwise. “It’s about what happens when you’re stretched physically, mentally, even vaginally! (It’s about what happens when you’re stretched physically, mentally and even vaginally),” the chanteuse told Rolling Stones. Dilated, rarefied, thoughtful are in fact the first adjectives that come to mind to describe it.
03/06/2024
