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Jul 7, 2016With The Bride, Khan has created a sublime tale of sorrow and recovery, of accepting loss and working through pain to become a stronger person. Likewise, Khan has taken her interest in similar journeys from earlier albums and used them to make her most consistently captivating work thus far.
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Jun 29, 2016The Bride is not only a journey for Natasha and the characters she has created--as with all great albums, listeners, too, will be met with a sea of contemplation.
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Jul 6, 2016The Bride might not be as accessible as its predecessors, yet after time invested it will have you curiously considering ceremony, matrimony, and individuality.
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Jun 30, 2016This is also her most musically subtle and lyrically direct album to date.
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Jul 13, 2016The Bride is a stellar soundtrack to the complexities of womanhood within the institution of marriage, a triumph of raw intensity.
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Jul 1, 2016Richer then than even the sum of its parts, The Bride is a beautiful, complex and often harrowing listening experience.
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Jun 30, 2016Barring Sunday Love--an electropop episode that movingly echoes the melody of Khan’s best-known track, Daniel--this is a collection of darkly intriguing dirges, a battle for dominance between Khan’s intimate, exquisitely beautiful vocal and subtly unnerving sonic dissonance at its heart.
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Jun 30, 2016This is a beautiful, beguiling, disturbing and rewarding album of love, loss, grief and recovery from one of the most intriguing singer-songwriters currently active in British music, of either gender.
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Jun 29, 2016Natasha Khan's fourth Bat for Lashes album is her most mature and cohesive yet.
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Q MagazineJun 29, 2016In the moving figure of The Bride, Khan has delivered her defining statement as an artist. [Aug 2016, p.109]
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Jun 29, 2016The result emulates, and equals, Joanna Newsom’s Divers, another ambitious album about the inescapable inter-connectedness of love and death.
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Jun 29, 2016Khan refuses to yield crossover hits like 2009’s ‘Daniel’ (only the frenetic rhythms of ‘Sunday Love’ come close) opting instead for a slow style of storytelling that rewards the patient listener.
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Jun 29, 2016She’s flipped the script on us, and in doing so has created her most cohesive work--and maybe even her happiest ending yet.
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MojoJun 28, 2016There is a single-minded intensity to the writing and the production which makes The Bride a very strong proposition indeed. [Aug 2016, p.91]
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UncutJun 27, 2016The Bride is her most accomplished realisation of her wandering mind yet. [Aug 2016, p.65]
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Jun 27, 2016Far from instant, spectral in feel and altogether dark in tone, The Bride is a challenge--although one with glorious pay-offs. Fans expecting the poppier sheen of Daniel or What’s A Girl To Do? might be disappointed, its treasures lie just beneath its surface.
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Jul 5, 2016Luckily, by the time we get to lead single “Sunday Love” The Bride has hit its stride, the track’s shuffling drum loop and plucked strings transporting listeners directly into the mania of the Bride’s pure heartbreak. From there, what began as a slightly unbalanced collection begins to take shape.
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Jul 5, 2016When her voice appears there's often a feeling of surrender and immersion in the setting. As with past Bat For Lashes releases, wide orchestral watercolor brush strokes are her friend, providing ethereality to underpin her vocal presence.
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Jul 1, 2016The most memorable song from the back half of the album, “In Your Bed,” sounds like it could have come from a different set of songs, judging by its lyrics.) As a result, The Bride goes past dreamy and into lullaby territory after a while, and the listener’s engagement with the music may drift off as well.
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Jun 29, 2016While it all may seem rather bleak, rays of light eventually cut through the gloom. The Bride’s captivating story and thoughtful arrangements prove addictive, as Khan’s impressive songwriting rewards multiple listens, another step toward the vaunted pantheon of British art rock.
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Jul 22, 2016It’s not a quick fix to the pain in her heart, but it is part of the essential journey, one that may be fabricated but feels all too real nonetheless thanks to Khan’s riveting and insightful storytelling.
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Jul 5, 2016Some may write it off as one-paced (and they’d have a point), but there are moments of heartache and beauty here that will be hard to touch in 2016.
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Jul 5, 2016Bat For Lashes has contributed an imaginative installment to our love affair with marriage, in all its charms and discontents.
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Jul 1, 2016Depending on listeners' patience, however, The Bride's slower second half may be hypnotic or dreary.
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Jul 1, 2016The album lags when the story gets too heavy. But there are many songs on The Bride that transcend its thematic conceit and stand on their own as unique puzzle pieces in Kahn's steadfastly mystifying persona.
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Jun 27, 2016That The Bride works best as a song cycle rather than a collection of pop hooks is a testament to its cohesion and intrinsic intertexuality, but what's missing here is Khan's knack for grafting avant-art-rock concepts onto mainstream forms.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 38 out of 50
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Mixed: 8 out of 50
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Negative: 4 out of 50
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Jul 4, 2016
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Sep 11, 2019
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Jun 17, 2018bat for lashes is a legend of alternative
i love you queen
comeback please!!