The Bride (album)

Released July 1, 2016 Recorded 2015 Length 47:32 Producers Natasha Khan Ben Christophers Simone Felice David Baron Dan Carey Jacknife Lee Aqualung Label Parlophone Discography (2012) (2016) (2019) From The Bride "I Do" Released: February 19, 2016 "In God's House" Released: March 18, 2016 "Sunday Love" Released: May 27, 2016 "Joe's Dream" Released: June 7, 2016 "If I Knew / In Your Bed" Released: December 16, 2016

"The Bride" is the fourth studio album by Bat For Lashes, released on July 1, 2016 through Parlophone. This was the final album with Parlophone, marking the end of a four-album contract.

The album was produced by Natasha Khan, with co-production from Ben Christophers, Simone Felice, David Baron, Dan Carey, Jacknife Lee and Matt "Aqualung" Hales.

The release of the album was preceded by the singles "In God's House" and "Sunday Love", both with music videos directed by Khan herself and John DeMenil.

Background

"This is the hero’s journey of realising that you have to love yourself before you love someone else." ― Natasha Khan

While promoting Sexwitch in 2015, Natasha stated that she was working on a new album. She stated that it was linked to a short film she had made about a woman going through a tragedy on her wedding day and that the album would be hopefully released in spring of 2016. She said the album was "torch-songy, but based around a story."

On February 19, 2016, a promotional single titled "I Do" with cryptic artwork stating "Save the Date, 1st July 2016" teased the album's release. The lead single from the album, "In God's House", debuted on Annie Mac's BBC Radio 1 show on March 10, and was released digitally the following day along with album announcement:

The Bride follows the story of a woman whose fiancé has been killed in a crash on the way to the church for their wedding. The Bride flees the scene to take the honeymoon trip alone, resulting in a dark meditation on love, loss, grief, and celebration. Written as the soundtrack for a feature length film in mind, The Bride is Khan’s most ambitious work to date, sonically and visually incorporating an entire world inhabited by The Bride, along with the characters and places she encounters on the way.

The album was loosely based on her short film I Do.

Music and composition

She further explained the album's concept in an interview:

I suppose the strongest message that comes out of these songs for me is that the trauma and the grief from the death of Joe, the groom. It’s definitely more of a metaphor and it allows me to explore the concept of love in general, which requires a death of sorts. In all relationships you have this romantic ideal at the beginning, and all of these projections and Cinderella ideals that you’ll meet someone who’ll satisfy your every need, then once you get married you’re off the hook and they’ve rescued you – everything’s going to be fine. Deep down, we all have that wish that someone else will do the work for us, of keeping us happy forever. It’s a high price to pay and expectation to have.

In another interview, she said:

"Marriage is one of the few spiritual rituals we can collectively share as a culture. It’s interesting that anyone’s willing to go through this ritual, but if you take away the thing they need to fulfill that obligation, what happens? So I took away the groom and made her go on a honeymoon alone. I thought it would be a nice metaphor for falling in love with yourself, starting a journey of self-discovery. You can’t just give that responsibility to something outside of yourself – you can’t count on someone to complete you and make you happy forever. So what happens when you take the crutch away? In film and storytelling it’s really interesting when the character is flung into the opposite of their expectation."

With half of the album going through a grieving process, The Bride character starts to find herself by the tracks "I Will Love Again" and "If I Knew." It might be alarming to rise above death so quickly, but as Khan points out, the bride and Joe are just characters playing out an important lesson.

“The death of her fiance is like the most obvious storytelling aspect, but if you remove that, the metaphor for me is, it’s not as sad because it’s about the death of the projection of romantic idealized love onto somebody else,” Khan said. “And the projection that someone else will complete you and fulfill you and you’ll meet them and your life will be perfect. It’s the death of that kind of romantic ideal, which I don’t think is very helpful to us anyway.”

The way Natasha composed the songs on The Bride was markedly different to writing her other records. She wrote the song titles first, decided what order they would run on the album and then created the words and music.

"Without even trying, the songs leapt out and started writing themselves," she continues. "I tried to wrangle them together and put them in some context by writing the titles of all the songs in order like chapters of a novel and incorporating the narrative arc of the bride and the story thread through them."

Natasha said her record label's A&R initially set her up with a series of hotshot pop producers in order to push the album onto pop charts. "But I kept coming away dissatisfied," she says of the early recording sessions, "because I had such a strong vision of what the album was to sound like, and I couldn't describe it to anyone, especially people who are used to doing more pop kind of music. And so, in the end, I told my manager and everyone started to realize that it wasn't working, that process. I needed to go and produce it myself." Natasha decided to name the album after photographer Neil Krug sent her a “1940s, Hitchcock looking” image of a woman wearing a veil. She told Rolling Stone:

"[Photographer] Neil Krug and I, we ended up doing all the visuals together. We started geeking out on loads of old films, sending each other old 1930s images of women with veils, and cults. And I got this vision: I told him I wanted my next project to be called The Bride. And he said, “That sounds like fun!” I wrote the story, but I know that to make a feature-length film, the production companies want you to prove you can do it with a short film first."

Contrary to popular belief, the album title wasn't inspired by the cover song "The Bride", released four years prior. Khan thought about the bride idea after covering this song.

Khan rented a house on top of Ohayo Mountain in Woodstock, New York and turned it into a studio, where she recorded the album in a six-week session in late 2015. It was also recorded in London, Los Angeles, and Brighton.

On Instagram, Natasha posted several photos of the album's recording process from November to December 2015:

With recording engineer Pete Hanlon

"Joe's Dream" under the title "Don't Say Goodbye"

Natasha with Rachel Yamagata e Sandy Bell

Recording "Widow's Peak"

Mastering the album at Metropolis Studios, NY

At Metropolis, 20 January 2016

The Bride's novella

The Bride's 2-LP box set

Promotion

The album was created with past collaborators Simone Felice, Dan Carey, Head and Ben Christophers. The release of the album was preceded by the singles "In God's House" and "Sunday Love", both with music videos directed by Khan herself and John DeMenil. To promote the album, Bat for Lashes embarked on a small tour which consisted of performing in a number of churches to match the wedding theme. Fans and attendees were asked to wear formal attire to the shows. The album's artwork was made in collaboration with photographer Neil Krug and was shot over the course of a year. The CD and vinyl feature a booklet and prints of the photos from this collaboration.

Critical reception

The Bride received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 78, based on 30 reviews. Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph hailed The Bride as "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." Rachel Aroesti of The Guardian described the album as "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." Larry Bartleet of NME viewed the album as Khan's "most ambitious yet" and remarked that she "refuses to yield crossover hits like 2009's 'Daniel' [...] opting instead for a slow style of storytelling that rewards the patient listener." George Garner of Q dubbed it Khan's "boldest album yet" and wrote, "In the moving figure of The Bride, Khan has delivered her defining statement as an artist." Nina Keen of DIY noted that "[t]here's a resistance [to] clichés on this record, and Khan gives a freshness and a sincerity to her otherwise ethereal music", calling the album "a beautiful, complex and often harrowing listening experience."

Pitchfork's Cameron Cook stated the album "may be Bat for Lashes' most ambitious project yet" and commented, "Its few shortcomings aside, The Bride is further proof that Khan, unlike almost all of her contemporaries, understands how to wade into mystical realms and emerge with big, beguiling pop." Kory Grow of Rolling Stone felt that although "the album lags when the story gets too heavy", "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." Heather Phares of AllMusic stated that the album "begins vividly", but was unimpressed with its "slower" second half, concluding that "The Bride is beautifully crafted, but not always thrilling." Katie Rife of The A.V. Club expressed that following "Never Forgive the Angels", "the power of The Bride's narrative begins to fade in a series of piano-focused ballads that, while uniformly beautiful [...] aren't distinctive enough songwriting-wise to stand out from one another." Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani wrote, "That 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."

Artwork

Many have compared the cover to PJ Harvey’s “Joan Crawford on acid” phase. Natasha Khan stated that she could “see the bride with blue eye shadow” and the whole concept for the album upon brainstorming ideas for future visual projects with her friend and photographer Neil Krug. The album artwork was shot at Angeles Crest Highway, California.

On the bride character, she said:

“It’s nice to personalize the bride and make her a bit more weird and eccentric and rock’n’roll. I’ve enjoyed getting to know her over the last couple of years. What would she look like? What would she do? She’s longing for that archetypal man-and-wife scenario, this construct that you think would be quite a mainstream desire, but her actual inner self is not mainstream at all. It was a balancing act between those two aspects of being a woman”.

"Front Cover"

"Front Cover (without lettering)"

"CD Cover"

"Magenta Limited-edition Vinyl"

"Back Cover"

"Box set content (love letter, car crash clipping, The Bride's photo booth style photos, and air freshener)"

Singles

• "I Do" was released on February 19, 2016 as the first promotional single from the album.
• "In God's House" was released on March 18, 2016 as the first official single from the album.
• "Sunday Love" was released on May 27, 2016 as the second official single from the album.
• "Joe's Dream" was released on June 7, 2016 as the third official single from the album.
• "If I Knew" and "In Your Bed" were released as a double promotional final single on December 16, 2016 from the album.

"I Do"

"In God's House"

"Sunday Love"

"Joe's Dream"

"If I Knew / In Your Bed"

Track listing

All songs are written and composed by Natasha Khan, except where noted. 

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Additional Producer	Length
1.	"I Do"			2:17
2.	"Joe's Dream"		Jacknife Lee	5:25
3.	"Honeymooning Alone"			3:30
4.	"Sunday Love"	Khan, Dan Carey	Dan Carey	4:13
5.	"Never Forgive the Angels"			4:25
6.	"Close Encounters"			4:10
7.	"Widow's Peak"	Khan, Simone Felice		3:47
8.	"Land's End"			3:10
9.	"If I Knew"			4:17
10.	"I Will Love Again"	Khan, Felice, Lou Rogai		5:14
11.	"In Your Bed"		Matt Hales, Felice, David Baron	3:32
12.	"Clouds" (bonus track)			5:32
Total length:				47:32

Credits

• Natasha Khan – Omnichord (tracks 1, 3, 5); vocals (all tracks); drum programming (tracks 2, 3); Rhodes, electric guitar, tambourine (track 2); keys, mandolin, pocket piano (track 3); synths (tracks 3, 5, 7, 12); drums (tracks 4, 6); harp (track 4); Farfisa organ (track 5); guitar (tracks 6, 9–11); string arrangements (track 7); celesta, vibraphone (track 8); piano, bass synth (track 10); drum machine (track 11); claps (track 12)
• Ben Christophers – bowed guitar (track 1); bass (tracks 1, 4, 6); vocals, piano (track 6)
• David Baron – bass (track 1); synths (tracks 1–3, 7); Rhodes (track 2); programming (tracks 2, 3, 7); string arrangements (track 7)
• Jacknife Lee – synths, programming, sampler (track 2)
• Alex Reeves – timpani (tracks 2, 4, 8); drums, percussion (track 8)
• Simone Felice – drums (track 3)
• Rachael Yamagata – backing vocals (tracks 4, 7)
• Sandy Bell – backing vocals (tracks 4, 7)
• Lou Rogai – guitars (tracks 4, 11, 12); bass (tracks 11, 12); backing vocals (track 11)
• Dan Carey – programming, synths (track 5)
• Leo Taylor – drums (track 5)
• Dawn Landes – guitar, backing vocals (track 8)
• Kevin Salem – guitar (track 8)
• Davide Rossi – strings (tracks 9, 12); string arrangements (track 9)
• Matt Hales – drum programming, synths (track 12)