Put your glad rags on and let's sing along. To that lonely song. You're the train that crashed my heart. You're the glitter in the dark. Ooh Laura, you're more than a superstar. And in this horror show. I've got to tell you so. Ooh Laura, you're more than a superstar. You say that you're stuck in a pale blue dream.

Whatever else you make of it, you'd be hard-pushed to call the cover of Natasha Khan's third album anything other than striking. Shot in black and white, Khan faces the camera naked, her modesty covered by the trailing limbs of the equally naked man she's carrying over her shoulders. The most intriguing thing might be the expression on her face, which carries a distinct hint of FFS about it: don't you just hate it when you end up with a naked man draped over your shoulder?It all makes for an intriguing contrast with the way Khan presented herself on the previous Bat for Lashes albums. Gone are the horses, head-dresses, candles and hippy accessories, the stuff that could cause a passer-by to label her kooky, one of the most dispiriting adjectives in the English language. The dictionary definition is eccentric, which fits Khan just fine: if you encourage audiences at your gigs to howl in order to "shed their humanity" and are given to telling journalists that wearing a head-dress can "draw the attention of the gods to your consciousness", you're clearly not targeting that corner of the market that voted Aiden Grimshaw off The X Factor because they thought he was a bit too weird. But kooky has somehow ended up redolent of a ghastly, grating, self-conscious zaniness. That doesn't really fit at all with Khan's music, which is inventive and dark and sensual. The Haunted Man's predecessor, Two Suns, managed to entice a rare guest vocal out of Scott Walker, not a man you imagine has much truck with self-conscious zaniness. There's a sneaking suspicion that the way Bat for Lashes is perceived might have put people off, either because the very idea of buying an album by a kooky female singer-songwriter makes them feel a bit poorly, or because that area of their record collection is already full to bursting point: there are a lot of artists out there making with the watch-out-I'm-a-loony faces and crazy Spotify content?This article includes content provided by Spotify. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Reading on mobile? Listen the cover matches the contents. For one thing, the peeved look and wilting companion fit with at least some of the words on The Haunted Man, which deal with hopeless men of varying shades of horridness: nice but pathetic amid the tick-tocking guitars of All Your Gold, violent and angry against the electronics of A Wall. For another, The Haunted Man sounds like a bold, confident album that strips away a lot of the sonic embellishments from Khan's sound. Apparently nothing could be further from the truth: it's the product of some tortuous sessions, during which Khan was beset by fears that she'd never make another album, but you'd struggle to work that out from listening to fairness, you'd never call The Haunted Man a triumph of unadorned simplicity. The episodic title track features a strident male chorus and martial snare drums; it falls away into a lengthy coda of hushed burbling electronics. Among its indelible choruses, Marilyn contains what can only be described as an interlude comprised entirely of people shouting "yoo-hoo!". Oh Yeah opens with a mass of sampled voices singing the title over and over again, before resolving into more straightforward synth-pop. Elsewhere, timpani is in evidence on more than one occasion. Nevertheless, it certainly feels more streamlined and sleek, more obviously pop-oriented than its predecessor. The studio hasn't always been Khan's friend: her 2006 debut album, Fur and Gold, was hobbled by an over-glossy production, which left songs that sounded visceral and gripping on stage buckling under the weight of their own varnish. But here the uncluttered approach seems to fit Khan's voice – you notice her affecting ability to suddenly switch from strident to bruised in the middle of a phrase better when it's not fighting for sonic space – and the material. Opener Lillies has one of those effortless melodies that sounds immediately familiar. The piano ballad Laura doesn't need colouring with anything more than a gentle shading of woodwind because it's a fantastic song, with a simple, naggingly effective piano line and a chorus irresistible enough to make its lowly placing on the singles chart seem a bit are a couple of moments where you can just about make out the album's difficult gestation: Horses of the Sun and Rest Your Head aren't bad songs as such, but they feel slightly laboured, where the rest of The Haunted Man feels unforced. Perhaps it's the sound of someone who's worked out that less can sometimes be more, that not trying too hard isn't the same as not trying.

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