Bat for Lashes,
Shepherds Bush Empire, London

Natasha Khan, a 29-year-old from Brighton who goes under the gnomic alias Bat for Lashes, has spoken of wanting to bring quirkiness back to pop music. Her 2006 debut album, Fur and Gold, won praise from the indisputably quirky likes of Thom Yorke and Björk and was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.

Her last tour involved a stage set designed to look like an enchanted forest, in which the singer disported like an ethereal sprite – or Kate Bush, to whom comparisons were inevitably drawn. Her current tour, in support of new album Two Suns, is also theatrical in a hippy-bohemian sort of a way, with Khan, in Elizabethan ruff and harlequin-style suit, performing on a stage cluttered with bric-a-brac such as angel dolls, an antique lamp and a picture of a wolf, as if allowing us a peek inside her dream world.

Ethereal sprite: Natasha Khan

Friday’s show began with the stage lit in murky red as Khan sang Two Suns’ opening track “Glass”. Her vocals were breathy and penetrating, their impact heightened by powerful drumming. The live setting emphasised her music’s supple blend of the airy and the down-to-earth. “Sleep Alone” combined a fragile folk guitar motif with pulsing synthesiser beats. “Sarah”, from Fur and Gold, had a dirty bass line improbably reminiscent of Steppenwolf’s biker anthem “Born to be Wild”.

Khan sang with poise but also a certain reserve. Her squeal at a shrill blast of feedback was a rare moment when her deportment slipped. There was, at times, the sense of watching talented pupils let loose in the music room of an extremely well-resourced school. Esoteric instruments were used – a strange folding device, a string instrument with a horn attached, little silver bells – in a way that smacked of imagination but also, faintly, of showing off.

Khan’s ambitions outreach themselves on the concept behind Two Suns, which aims to explore in true prog rock fashion the duality of the self. This didn’t come across live at all, other than in the odd unilluminating lyric (“Day cannot exist without night”). Yet the power of the music accompanying such sentiments, with tribal percussion beating a bold rhythm and Khan’s voice swooping magically, was irresistible. When she devises a staging to match the songs, she will be a force to reckon with. Perhaps it’s time to return to the enchanted forest. ★★★☆☆