If musicians were twinned with musicians from other countries in the same way towns are, Brooklyn’s Shara Worden, for all intents and purposes, My Brightest Diamond, would be twinned with Brighton’s Nathasha Khan, for all intents and purposes, Bats For Lashes. Both outsiders, theirs is an aura of a bygone age. Of a defiant Boudica, a speaking-in-tongues Joan of Arc, a Cleopatra with a voice to match her looks.

Khan’s co-producer David Kosten recalls the time she told him she wanted a song to sound as if she was "in bed, cuddled up with a friend, aged nine". It’s the sort of request one could just as easily imagine Worden making to her producer during the recording of A Thousand Shark’s Teeth. If it weren’t for the fact Worden served as vocalist, producer, and arranger on this, her sophomore album.

A richer-than-Crassus listening experience, this will warrant play after play. After play after play. For, as they say, diamonds are forever.

(4/5)