There's a man selling peacock feathers just outside Shepherd's Bush tube tonight. He's not doing too well. Maybe he didn't get the email. Natasha Khan, the singing composer at the heart of Bat for Lashes, went all sleek and monochrome around the time of her third album, 2012's The Haunted Man.
Having called her debut album Fur and Gold, it was surely quite galling for Khan when the floaty pagan squaw look became so widely available in New Look. It was probably even more galling when, two albums into Khan's critically acclaimed career, Florence and the Machine released a second album called Ceremonials and stole a great deal of Khan's art-pop thunder.
Tonight, for the final show of Bat for Lashes's Haunted Man tour, Khan has come as a friendly sorceress, all in rippling black but smiling broadly. "Practically [her] whole family" is here. A couple of amulets and the leathery ligatures hanging from her elbows are all that remain of her fetish for fetishes. Behind Khan and her band stands a twinkly sky backdrop, some signalling lanterns and a little ramp that looks, from up in the circle, like a wedge of blackened gouda that Khan occasionally clambers on to to peer over an adoring crowd. Where once this would-be shaman would beat a drum, now she thwacks a drum pad. A string section wanders on and off as required.
Modernity actually suits Khan. Tonight's performance proves she can still sing convincingly about Jungian archetypes without dangly accessories. Moreover, she can now invoke eagle spirits and the like with her shoulders, busting sinuous moves first seen on the tremendous video to All Your Gold. On songs such as Glass (from 2009's Two Suns) and Oh Yeah (from The Haunted Man), Khan matches shrugs and tics to beats with mechanistic exactitude. It's not quite Beyoncé-calibre but she's bringing some welcome emphasis and rigour to music that sometimes threatens to meander off, chasing a will o' the wisp into the dusk.
Perhaps tonight's biggest revelation is how far Khan's electronics have travelled, from latency to potency. Horse and I used to be a thin, urgent harpsichord fable; now it has necked some steroids and discovered a taste for drama. Another dulcet oldie, Sleep Alone, turns into a rattling shakedown, with Khan waving a red maraca.
From a critical perspective these fiercer Björk-like workouts – such as Rest Your Head, with its nagging motif, or The Haunted Man itself, where Khan lifts an ancient speaker over her head triumphantly – are infinitely more arresting than those songs where Khan devolves into a nice breathy lady, caressing the ivories. But her most traditional, ladylike moment – the Elton-lite piano ballad Laura, co-written with Justin Parker, who co-wrote Lana Del Rey's Video Games – has the place in raptures. A bare-bones cover of Fleetwood Mac's Rhiannon, meanwhile, reveals an important source, not just for the recurring myths in Khan's work but for the whole floaty white witch trope so beloved of female performers as far apart as Courtney Love, Taylor Swift and Florence Welch: Stevie Nicks.
It really is a crying shame that The Haunted Man has not been more commercially successful. Having gone Top 10, it has since sold fewer copies than Two Suns, despite being the braver, more tuneful and more cogent record. Khan went all the way to Italy to better record men's voices across an echoing gorge; she underwent a two-day Native American ceremony to put her closer in touch with her ancestral spirits (Mongolian, apparently, on her Pakistani father's side). She stripped naked, too, eschewing airbrushing and leg-shaving, for the album's cover, in which the titular Haunted Man – also naked, slung over her shoulders – looks more like a hunted man.
Tonight, Khan leaves the stage grinning after the encore, saying that she hopes to be back with a new record soon. She fought hard against her record label to make The Haunted Man the way she wanted to, even self-financing various elements. Without the vindication – and the bargaining clout – that a hit provides, you worry what kind of record her next one might be.
