Bat For Lashes, Two Suns

Review by Mark Reed

In the fifties, she would iron, and clean, she would vaccum the house and darn socks, work idly round the house, gaze into the clouds and see the shape of her man. Him, stoic, hard, but soft, would fight the wars of the world outside, would drive the Buick to the office, smoke at his desk and calculate the profit gearing of the tea imports, sit and drink with the boys, play the role of the man, wishing that he was home, deep in his cocoon with her, the Juliet to his Romeo, as the world slowly killed them with dinner sets and social conventions.

This is what “Two Suns” sounds like. Two objects in orbit of each other, two massive balls of fire that can give or take life, burn or warm : two hearts, two objects of huge potential. In the rear view mirror of our lives, the two suns in the sunset – the setting white dwarf, the other the mushroom cloud of our great advances.

“Two Suns”. Like the debut, it sounds like to me, the inarticulate speech of the heart, the rolling waves, the feeling beyond language, where fragments of lyric become a glimpse into another world, where percussion and punctuation thunder loving heartbeats, where souls move beyond the mundane to so much more than we ever thought.

This record elevates, transports, in the blink of an eye, a flash of the music, the whole world goes away, and you are there, dancing to a silent drum, gazing at the clouds, thinking of your loved one, the reason why we do all this, and hearing the voice of purpose in your head: This is why we do all this stuff, why we endure the indignities of work slavery and tax. Where souls meet, where lips touch, where love conquers all things. This record is not just music : the representation, the capturing in msuical form of a two hearted dream, where we, us together can conquer all.

This is the sound of being madly, passionately in love, that second where the souls entwine, and everything in the world is beautiful, and nothing is impossible.