Winter is coming, and doesn’t Bat For Lashes (Natasha Khan)- know it. The Haunted Man is the ideal soundtrack to a cold night indoors- she’s come a long way from the girl who by her own admission would bunk off school and listen to Nirvana tapes all day.

Anything she learned from Kurt Cobain and friends, though, is rather well hidden. Her main touchstone here appears to be her good friend Cat Power (Chan Marshall)- everything here at least the equal of 1998′s Moon Pix (though according to an interview in this month’s issue of Mojo magazine Bat initially met Cat after hearing her version of the Velvet Underground’s I Found A Reason, from the imaginatively titled Covers Record, which she put out in 2000- with the original appearing on the Underground’s 1970 swan-song Loaded).

Lead single Laura adds a bit of Tori Amos to the pot, all piano and melodramatic lyricism, while the second, All Your Gold, chucks in a spot of Siouxsie & The Banshees at their dreamiest (1980′s Kaleidoscope perhaps the best starting point). From then on the dreaming really can begin, each subsequent offering feeling like a new excursion into the land of woozy nod- Lilies, Horses Of The Sun and Winter Fields particular stand-outs should you opt to dive under the duvet and banish the cold, a step on from Fur and Gold (2006) and the concept album Two Suns (2009)- no bats in this particular belfry.

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