We were only just getting to know Natasha Khan when she disappeared last year to start work on her second album. Having had her debut Fur & Gold nominated for the 2007 Mercury Music Prize, Bat For Lashes’ 29-year-old frontwoman appeared at the awards ceremony with peacock feathers on her shoulders, jabbing at a harpsichord and singing about moonlit forest banquets.

She seemed like just the sort of spooktastic new star a pop fan could use right now.

So last year, when news emerged that that the overindulged musical misanthrope Scott Walker would feature on her second album, it was hard not to feel concern. We can now rest easy. By the time Walker makes his cameo, Khan has dealt with all potential misgivings the only way she knows how — over ten songs that oscillate between Khan’s world and that of a “destructive, self-absorbed blonde femme fatale” alter ego called Pearl.

You might start wondering if there aren’t easier ways for a woman to access her muse, but it only takes the tribal drums and zithers of Glass to set you at ease. Promising “a thousand crystal towers” and “a hundred emerald cities” on the opening song of your album ought to be an act of pop hubris unrivalled since the dim Hovis-rockers Embrace once claimed they had made the best album of all time.

In Khan’s case, however, you suspect that such talk is more likely the result of watching The Dark Crystal at a formative age. Amid the fantastical hinterlands depicted in the tidal piano caress of Moon and Moon and Peace of Mind, the emotions evoked by Khan seem rooted in the dislocation of two years spent shuttling between her boyfriend in New York and her home in Brighton.

It doesn’t matter which songs are sung in the guise of Khan’s alter ego. Having created Pearl as an outlet for her darker thoughts, her Siren Song may be “in character”, but really it’s impossible to perceive any distance between Khan’s tender plea to a lover and the devices that spawned the song.

Right after it, Pearl’s Dream is quite simply a blast, a worthy offspring to Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill and Fleetwood Mac’s Big Love — bearing testament to the pop heart that beats at the centre of even Bat for Lashes’ most esoteric moments. If you set about reconfiguring an early Cure single for a 4 am drive along a deserted Belgian motorway you’d come up with something not dissimilar to the Europop-noir of the current single Daniel.

Amid such company there’s really only so much damage that even Walker can do. On The Big Sleep the reclusive singer delivers two lines and some pretty harmonies as Khan intones a sparse, spectral requiem to her freshly slain alter ego. For poor dead Pearl second albums don’t come much more difficult than this. For Khan, however, a breeze.

(Parlophone, TS £10.76)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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