- It’s a new album from New Zealand singer/songwriter Aldous Harding, so we’re in for another collection of offbeat folk-rock with a haunting, even disquieting undercurrent. The eagle-eyed have already spotted first single The Barrel and will be pleased to know the record just gets more expansive and adventurous from there. Yet this is also Harding’s most approachable collection of songs to date.
It’s partially reminiscent of some of the acts that emerged from the so-called “freak folk” movement of the 2000’s when indie musicians unplugged and let a kind of hallucinogenic pastoralism creep into their music. And while Harding could never be lumped in with the likes of the weird and woolly Devendra Barnhart, her music does find some parallels with 00’s rustic surrealists Tuung and Laura Marling’s recent project Lump.
This is apparent in opening number Fixture Picture, a track which unravels like a quirky pop song with a gently strange chorus as the title is repeated in lush multitracked harmony. With this song and a number of others, Harding appears to be singing about how we are gravitationally connected to the Earth, and that everything from our own personal feelings are simultaneously magnified and dwarfed into existential nothingness by the uncaring vastness of space.
This is also reflected in titles such as Weight Of The Planets, while Heaven Is Empty evokes an existing paradise that none of us have as yet been pure enough to enter. Harding also uses nature to describe the mystery of human emotion. At one point she sings “The wave of love is a transient hut / The water’s the shell and we are the nut”.
As with her 2017 album Party, Harding works with PJ Harvey collaborator John Parrish. The sound produced is warm and welcoming, as basses, guitars and drums all glow with their rich, organic sound. It’s Harding herself who adds the contrast to this - her vocals have a haunting and febrile edge as she delivers lyrics filled with mystery and, at times, dread; and the melodies themselves, while far from inaccessible, frequently end up in places you don’t expect.
She is a fascinatingly unsettling performer - just check her shimmying in a pilgrim’s outfit in the video for The Barrel - but one whose softly sung evocations make for some of the most unique and thought provoking folk rock out there.
- Matt Thrower.