Bat For Lashes - Prescilla

Posted 22nd Mar 2007 in Single Reviews |

'Prescilla' boasts an immediately familiar-but-not-too-familiar vocal melody soaring beautifully at its climax; gentle harmonies teetering somewhere between happy and sad, and lyrics spatially somewhere between innocence and experience. So far, so good.

The fey instrumentation, however, is the single's high-water mark - thunder foot stomps and hand claps that make you want to dance as if invoking the rain god to vouchsafe the harvest. The chord-strumming ethereal autoharp that sends you on a path-lit nocturnal wandering, possibly stumbling upon Kate Bush. Beatbox and brass give the single a punch and panache lacking in the album version, which never really takes off under the weight of its heavy sole-grooving piano-turned-bass.

The b-side is a sensual piano cover of Bruce Springsteen's 'I'm On Fire'.