ALDOUS HARDING – TRAIN ON THE ISLAND: REVIEW
- 16 hours ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 9 hours ago
ALDOUS HARDING
Train On The Island (4AD)
AS SUBLIME AS IT often is, this may not be the album for you, it’s fair to warn.
Do you need to understand everything? If you leave a film, a book, a painting or an album in varying degrees of frustration because you don’t think you got the point being made, or indeed if you leave angry because you think the artist deliberately obscured meaning, Aldous Harding is at best a provocation.
You can guess at her intentions, but she is not inclined to confirm them – “I’m only riding that symbol,” she intones in an airy, wistful, folkish, and quite beautiful moment – you can discern a reasoning based on style or tone as much as text and context, but you eventually realise that this guess is your imposition and says more about you than her as you’re the one feeling the feeling, right? Which is fine, actually, if, as I say, you don’t need to understand everything.
There is an ambiguity about the stories, firstly, but also about the language that shapes the imagery, and then in the delivery, from where in her vocal range she pitches up to the clarity, or otherwise, of her phrasing. “Medication slows my mind,” Harding says in one song, but it’s a furphy, for there is often exquisite alacrity in how she describes emotional moves as you try to keep up.
Another song begins “When I hit the ocean I was only a spark/Who brought me up the stem with no love in their heart?/What my god is thinking?/I get lost in that place” and her voice sits low in the undercarriage merging with the rhythm. But when everything – bass, earthy drums, muffled brass - drops away to voice and piano, nothing is between you and Harding singing, like a lost internal wanderer, “What am I gonna do if I can't break out of it?/What am I gonna do?/They can't train me out of it”.
What is true? In One Stop, on this, her fifth album – made well after she moved to Wales where she shares domestic duties with fellow musician Huw Evans, also known as H Hawkline – she talks about running into Welsh dark master John Cale and finding him eating rice, not talking (“but I don’t mind”) while she is occupied. Later in the song she says “Why wouldn’t I wanna meet you?” after telling us that “I rip myself on/I rip myself off/Imagining from the block/Imagining”, and what seemed possible but unlikely now becomes something else again.
“So the lies I tell, send me up and I can’t get down/I’m wearing big grass to town.” Is the connection with someone else? Is that connection any more real than this Cale meeting? Is she lying to herself about things that matter most? Or, is it like the following song, the album’s title track, where she tells us that “reflections steal my mind”, in another reference, almost in passing, to the slippery nature of the mind and the memory.
This is not only about the lyrics either, though that would be sufficient, because Harding (whose passport may identify her as Hannah Harding or Hannah Topp, of Lyttelton, in the south island of New Zealand) is far more nebulous a proposition musically than your average singer/songwriter. She’s happy to explore folk’s byways in the middle of a pop song, can lead you down dark winding paths of mood music that turn sharply in, or as in the closing track of hesitant beat and confident, casual guitar, Coats, create a tense journey between the punishingly regular and the suggestively odd.
With H. Hawkline in tow, Venus In The Zinnia slides into a space that is Gainsbourg-in-Dunedin: chugging forward but coated in something that nags at your sense of unease, pop-friendly but set up in the corner of bar with intermittent lighting, caught in a rainstorm and not unhappy about it. If Lady Does It brings both Blossom Dearie (not the first time I’ve heard her in a Harding album) and John Cale (not his first mention) to mind, flighty but actually tethered, pointing to the light but bent around it rather than through it. Both are delightful, neither is clear.
The thing is, I may not be able to explain Train On The Island, and I could be completely wrong with whatever my explanation is any way, but I do know this, it keeps me coming back.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Aldous Harding – Train On The Island