The strident piano chords and lone snare of 'Traveling Woman' echoes PJ Harvey's desolate roadsongs, while 'Moon and Moon''s delicate piano playing and cabinet-reverbed backing vocals evoke early Tori Amos. One needn't have any more than a basic working knowledge of female innovators from the past few decades to be able to spot the ghosts lurking around this stage. Khan's real breakthrough might simply be her willingness to wear her influences more brazenly.
A significant step forward from her debut, Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far. Nonetheless, as of Two Suns, her second full-length album, all of that takes a backseat. Khan's aesthetic is such a perfectly struck balancing act between earth mother hippie mystic and post-modern Gen Y art student (see: the cover for her latest single 'Daniel', which depicts her on a beach, shivery and windswept, with a painting of The Karate Kid's Daniel LaRusso adorning her entire naked back) that it's difficult to forget about the sheer workaday craft that must go into constantly seeming so effortlessly, artfully rumpled. Actually, to be honest, that temptation remains.
