Album of the Week: Aldous Harding – 'Train On The Island'
Later this month, the New Zealander born in 1990 as Hannah Topp heads out on tour.
The singer-songwriter – who was long based in Cardiff but is now back home – starts in Brighton, does three nights at the Barbican in London, wiggles round England, Scotland and Ireland till June, then continues round Europe throughout the summer. She winds up on the eastern side of the Atlantic at Wales’s Green Man Festival in late August, hits America and Canada for a month, before finally pitching up in Australia and New Zealand in mid-November, as spring shades into the southern hemisphere summer.
It's a lot of touring for anyone, far less for an “indie-rock enigma” (© what’s left of the music press) who’s become progressively more reluctant, in the dozen years she’s been releasing albums, to engage with the media. She hasn’t even approved a record company biography – standard promotional practice round an album’s release – in a decade.
Talking to The Guardian in 2019, Harding admitted that she’d decline to respond to questions “if I don’t feel like the answer’s going to come out in a natural, musical way”. Talking to Pitchfork in 2022, she framed her unwillingness, or inability, to describe her music thus: “It’s like somebody who doesn’t like to dance because they don’t like their body. Suddenly I’m in the middle of the floor, and I’ve got my hips working, and I just feel awful. You know?” We know.
And it’s a lot of touring for an album as wondrous, beauteous, shimmering and borderline fragile as Train on the Island. It’s her fifth album overall, her fourth in a row recorded at the legendary Rockfield Studios, Monmouthshire’s psychogeographical hotspot where rock’n’roll meets farming, and her fourth with co-producer/musician John Parish (PJ Harvey, Dry Cleaning).
That said: this is “fragility” built on stout and robust songwriting, and on production that is vividly curlicued in its detail. Once a Harding melody worms in, it stays there, curving and curling, entwined and nagging. When a Harding song unfurls, its sonic details unveil like patterns on a butterfly wing. These 10 tracks are spellbinding perfection.
The title track is a five-a-minute, lazy-jazz epic recalling Laura Nyro. The opening ‘I Ate the Most’ is beguiling folktronica, Harding’s close-mic’d voice and self-harmonies right up in your ear. ‘One Stop’ is an irresistible marvel of piano-ballad chamber-pop, conjuring both striking imagery (“I met the real John Cale, he had no words, but I don't mind, I packed the stage while he ate rice”) and, should the mood take you, as evidenced by Harding’s gyrations in the video, some sweet moves.
There are, too, gyrations of the clock-stopping, jaw-dropping vocal and instrumental kind. ‘San Francisco’ has a quiet sprawl, shifting from a loose, country-bluesy swagger, to spartan jazz torch-song, to pure singer-songwriter acoustica the next. ‘What Am I Gonna Do?’ evokes the PJ Harvey of Let England Shake era, with its tumbling rumble of drums, organ and harp, and its different manifestations of the multiple-personality Harding voice: low murmur, high keen, Laurel Canyon folk sweetness.
‘If Lady Does It’ is another perfectly executed mix of the baroque and the skeletal – one minute, just drums organ breaths and whispered vocals; the next, a rising and falling and finally fading tide of piano, acoustic guitar and that shimmering voice.
This is Train on an Island all over: a rewarding headphones record, and a record to be joyously shared. At those live shows, the sound of pins dropping will be cacophonous.
