British singer-songwriter Natasha Khan, better known as Bat for Lashes, created a buzz with the luscious fantastic landscapes of her 2006 debut Fur and Gold; think Tori Amos while she was writing Little Earthquakes sitting in the same room as Bjork while she was writing Homogenic while Sarah McLachlan and a band of gypsies listen on, all the while Talking Heads is playing softly the background. Her second album, Two Suns, is just as promising; it’s a microcosm of duality, at times a straight-out spiritual throwdown between Khan’s mysticism and the cynicism of her created alter ego, Pearl. The common ground between the two seems to lay in the murky expanse of reality, whatever it has turned out to be. At the root of Two Suns is a breakup, and with that breakup brings the loss of, if not complete hope, than the theology behind it. In the opener, “Glass” still with hope, she travels across the sea in search of her lover. What she finds are “A thousand crystal towers/A hundred emerald cities,” and though her knight has on his shining armor, she sees, “To be made of glass/When two suns are shining/The battle becomes blinding.” As the story progresses—and if there’s a criticism to be had of Two Suns, it’s this—it’s a little hard to decipher who is who. Of course there is logic in the impenetrable; when dealing in the game of love, sometimes it’s hard to know who is dealing and who is being dealt. By the story’s end, in the haunting “The Big Sleep” it’s apparent neither side found what they were looking for. “It’s a goodbye/It’s curtains double time” Khan and the criminally under-appreciated Scott Walker—of The Walker Brothers—sing. The piano fades and Two Suns ends with a pulsing buzz. Prophetic, perhaps, when thinking of its implications. It’s well earned.