Leave the fur…

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Katherine St Asaph: “‘Cause you’re a good man, I keep telling myself” — the moment you think this, it’s over. The remainder of the relationship is now a race to see who figures it out first. Or maybe it’s not, maybe the rush of angels is Hallmark bunk, maybe no one really feels that emotion. But this is coming from Bat for Lashes, who’s turned romantic failure into a mystical quest, sleeping around into a feverish siren song and heartbreak into a seething slow burn that’s suited equally to feudal intrigue as the dance floor. If she’s not moved to whisper great love stories, that’s a dealbreaker. “All Your Gold” is more grounded — on purpose, if you want to be meta — than those singles, both in text (I’ve been on both sides of this, and it is all accurate) and music. The guitar licks and pinging synths come from everywhere; the vocal stylings are more girl-group than Khan generally assays. (“What’s a Girl to Do” is DQed on grounds of spoken word.) And the twitchy ambivalence paired with “someone that I knew before” is going to draw predictable Gotye comparisons, but verses will be verses, and do you know any better way to describe these exes to a partner? (No, “exes” isn’t it.) But the talk of gold, cloud of strings and panic-pitched chorus are all Khan’s fantasias, attached to the wrong man and painfully out of place. They don’t resolve, merely recede, so she can keep telling herself they’ve gone away.
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Anthony Easton: The first line of this is evocative of modern isolation and technology, how she sings “someone that I knew before” is ennui-tastic, and the drums are beautiful. It sounds like an anhedonic Karen O, or maybe someone who grew up listening to too much Nick Cave and took all the right lessons from him.
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Alfred Soto: Tribal percussion and high-pitched mysterious femme vocals vie for the moniker “interesting.” 
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Patrick St. Michel: “All Your Gold,” at least for a little bit, sounds a lot like “Somebody That I Used To Know.” It starts with the same minimalistic shuffle before eventually bursting open into an impassioned passage… featuring the line “there was someone that I knew before.” The big difference between the two, though, is that Gotye let his song come to a quiet end. Bat For Lashes, meanwhile, lets “All Your Gold” burn out brightly, the beat galloping on while a string section plays. It is relationship drama made for the big screen. 
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Britt Alderfer: “All Your Gold” feels like a bittersweet spot between the gloomy drift of Bat For Lashes’s first album and the epic grandeur of the second. There are so many different sounds that build up, from the rhythm that comes in at the beginning like a jittery, uneven heartbeat to the ting-ting of bells, like a spoon tapping a glass, and then the synth that creeps in during the chorus. The overall effect is groping for serenity; maybe the post-breakup wholeness you so badly want to feel after you’ve made it through the worst emotional leftovers of a bad split. You want to be satisfied in your independence and memories of tenderness.
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Jonathan Bogart: The tension implicit in the closely-plucked instrumentation and her tightly controlled squeal never goes anywhere. I’m not complaining that there’s no release, exactly; just that I now have a bit of a headache.
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Brad Shoup: Dig that “Shortnin’ Bread” bassline. I’m not so taken with gold-theft as a metaphor, or that fact that the track abruptly ends to commence a search party. But here begins my autumnal generosity.
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Iain Mew: The love as treasure motif of “All Your Gold” goes right back to “Trophy” from Fur and Gold, while its rhythmic emphasis and the high pitched sweep of the chorus are musically close to Two Suns. It doesn’t reach for the towering epic heights of “Glass” or “Two Planets” or even “Daniel,” but its less abstract relationship dramas have their own power. It’s difficult to untangle its pleasures as a song from the pleasure of returning to her well-realised world, but I don’t really see the need to.
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