Aldous Harding - Train On The Island
★★★★
4AD
There’s a temptation to sit down with a new Aldous Harding album like you’re a detective trying to crack a case: evidence folders piled up, post-it notes on the whiteboard, a forensic psychologist on speed-dial. Now on her fifth album, the New Zealander can feel less like a musician and songwriter, more like a kind of indie Moriarty, a master of disguise, a genius of escape, eluding capture with a fiendish array of wide-brimmed hats, unnerving masks, coded metaphors (“show the ferret to the egg”, for example) and peculiar Interpol-defying accents.
In the past, Harding has compared discussing her writing process to “rolling over and telling somebody about a dream”; being a vague eyewitness to a robbery, or finding sand in a towel and not knowing how it got there. All fabulous images; all little help to anyone hoping to gloss her work with meaning. Or, as she said slightly more impatiently in a 2019 interview, “People are just so keen to get to the bottom of stuff that's none of their business.”
It feels like wandering into a trap, then, to suggest that Train On The Island, her first album since 2022’s gloriously elliptical Warm Chris, is her most direct yet. The video for first single One Stop shows a newly cropped Harding dancing vigorously in a bunker, emotion and strain showing on her face. It’s a fierce contrast to the visuals for 2017’s Blend, where she aggressively gyrated her way through the male gaze in a showgirl cowboy outfit, or for 2019’s curious chanson The Barrel, where she twitched and jutted in uncanny boots and a blue mask like an escapee from Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge.
Train On The Island opens with the superb I Ate The Most, its thready, bilious synthesizer sounding like Kid A grown up and gone to seed. It seems to witness the moment a child realises the protections and comforts of infancy are vanishing, a reverse Slipping Through My Fingers. “I am through with you on my shoulders,” Harding sings, sounding like a parent who can no longer carry their offspring. There are references to heaviness, disordered eating, love being “sweet like lemon”. Everything is double-edged, untrustworthy: a reference to CS Lewis’s Narnia chronicles – “The Silver Chair and Rilian” – is forced out by the real world in the second verse – “silver hair and Ritalin”. It never quite delivers the solid logical narrative its structure promises (“I’m not afraid like you’re not gay”) but it feels like a song about loss of innocence, the realisation life might be easier if you take up as little room as possible.
The songs that follow match its mercurial pace. The anchor-weight piano riff of One Stop seems to be dragged up by a hometown visit. “I’m gonna write what I know,” sings Harding in a clear, unmediated voice, before exposing how her life has changed. “I met the real John Cale,” she sings, “He had no words but I don’t mind / I packed the stage while he ate rice.” By the time Harding hits the refrain of “why wouldn’t I wanna meet you?”, the song has worm-holed itself into a curious space between St. Vincent and Caravan, a prog-pop meltdown in keeping with the mood of disorientation, of never being able to go home again. Did she really meet John Cale at some festival or other? Did he eat rice? It doesn’t really matter.
There are other moments that land with perfect lucidity, like emerging from fog onto a cliff edge. What Am I Gonna Do?, ribboned with Mali Llywelyn’s harp, rattles along like a hand-whittled version of Unfinished Sympathy, before the music drops away and Harding sings “What am I going to do / I can’t break out of it / what am I going to do / they can’t train me out of it?” The same happens with San Francisco, where Harding returns to One Stop’s desperate refrain, disrupting the misty millennial pop (“I lost my head in San Francisco / you begged me not to drink alone”) like a hectic intrusive thought. She sounds beautifully present on the title track’s submerged, strung-out Fleetwood Mac, too, lifting a line from an Appalachian folk song to hint at something distant: an unachievable goal, a lost person, a whistle in the dark.
Since 2017’s Designer, Harding has worked with producer John Parish, PJ Harvey’s eternal right-hand man, and Train On The Island confirms the intuitive excellence of their match. Harding’s voice and lyrics inevitably dominate, but her fleet, agile music is just as subtle and strange, schooled in Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci’s sprouting ergot-pop, or Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom. There’s a psychedelic shimmer off Joe Harvey-Whyte’s pedal steel, Thomas Poli’s modular electronics, the reactive, smoked-glass piano and synths, the slightly off-beam acoustic guitar of Riding That Symbol.
Harding remains a fascinating songwriting provocateur.
Harding still plays with her voice on this album – there’s a little Spanish roleplay on Worms, a gallic shiver on If Lady Does It, a high, girlish briskness on Venus In The Zinnia, a deceptively unhinged duet with H Hawkline, but she doesn’t throw on quite so many costumes and covers. It’s best not to be lulled into a sense of false security by Train On The Island, though – this is a record that features the brilliant, inexplicably heartbreaking line “you laugh at me for keeping feathers / but you don’t see me helping down the naked owl.” Coats, meanwhile, sees her clenching her voice tight until the blunt, country-grunge chorus – “big thick coats on the dogs of people trying to help”. Somehow – and you’d probably need an MRI scanner and X-ray specs to work out exactly how - it connects perfectly with the song’s seemingly fractured narrative of adolescent vulnerability, of summer days tinged by dark, unhealthy shadows. “What do you say when you meet blue women?” she sings, casting new light on the blue-faced artwork (not to mention that worrying mask from The Barrel).
No, stop. Close the folders, pull down the incident board. There’s everything to see here, but it doesn’t depend on meeting the “real” Aldous Harding any more than the “real John Cale”. What matters is that Harding remains a fascinating songwriting provocateur, preternaturally disciplined, but able to trip emotional wires you might not even know you had. “I’m only riding that symbol,” she sings, “No one knows what I’m into.” Case very much open.
Train On The Island is out 8 May on 4AD.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
1. I Ate The Most
2. One Stop
3. Train On The Island
4. Worms
5. Venus In The Zinnia
6. If Lady Does It
7. San Fransisco
8. What Am I Gonna Do?
9. Riding That Symbol
10. Coats
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