Aldous Harding is part of a long tradition of outsider pop stars whose music chucks a monkey wrench into conventional ideas about how a song should be structured – that a verse should be followed by a hook and so on – yet who has parlayed that idiosyncrasy into ever greater popularity.
Idiosyncrasy is the word. Harding is hardly a megastar, yet she rarely gives interviews, so insights into her working methods are largely guesswork. She certainly doesn’t pander to newcomers.
Her speciality is hallucinatory goth pop that has one foot in alternative pop, one in the world of experimental classical, yet is ultimately too far out to fit any conventional definition.
How apt that she should have described herself as the indie Jim Carrey. As with a comic who is a bit too manic, her songs have an intensity both dazzling and claustrophobic.
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If you appreciate music that is not in much of a hurry to be liked, she is the acquired taste you’ve been looking for. But it’s also possible to imagine the unwary listener being deeply spooked by songs that unspool like a feverish mush of Björk, Cocteau Twins and PJ Harvey (whose long-time producer, John Parish, is a regular Harding collaborator).
Yet even with all of those qualifications, her fifth album, Train on the Island (for which she is once again joined by Parish), is a divine chunk of pop eccentricity. Hypnotic and full of fractured, poetic imagery, it is wonderfully bizarre, though you have to come to it, rather than the other way around.
Like a difficult novel or a film that doesn’t make any sense, it exists deep in the art-house zone. Expectations need to be adjusted accordingly.
The creative life of the New Zealander, who is now based in Wales, has unfolded on the margins of the music business. That sense of being far from the bright lights ripples through Train on the Island, which chugs away in the gloom, not too bothered whether the casual listener is still on board. It is completely wrapped up in itself, and over 10 absorbing tracks that’s revealed to be a blessing.
The album begins with a Radiohead-style flutter of synthesisers and grooves – a sort of Kid A for Gen Z – before her conversational voice sweeps in, simultaneously chatty and chilling. Harding has a folky singing style that is both blunt and mellifluous. Think Lisa O’Neill mixed with Laura Marling.
But she isn’t interested in conventional folk arrangements. On the opening track, I Ate the Most, her voice drifts through a tune that moves between dreamlike imagery and startlingly frank moments (“sometimes I eat until I vomit”).
The tone is heavy and sometimes rueful; on One Stop, for instance, she wryly recalls an awkward encounter with John Cale of The Velvet Underground (“he had no words”) as a guitar chimes balefully. That seems to be the point of a lot of Harding’s music; as an artist her go-to is to crack one-liners as the apocalypse looms.
She is not unmindful of contemporary trends in music. The shadow of the arena-filling indie band Boygenius infuses Venus in the Zinnia, where she comes across as almost jaunty as she sings with her boyfriend, the musician Huw Evans, aka H Hawkline. It’s a straight-up alt-folk banger and instant classic in the genre of indie duets – an Islands in the Stream for people who get up early for Bandcamp Friday.
Harding’s experimental side is never quite out of sight, though. She retreats into unplugged starkness on Riding That Symbol, where her voice (a bit coy, slightly chilling) orbits a skeletal riff. The tone then shifts from woozy to bluesy on the album’s closer, Coats.
Here, Parish’s associations with PJ Harvey shine through most strongly on a number that suggests a cousin once removed from the raw-boned gospel pop Harvey was making in the mid-1990s.
It’s one of the more unoriginal tunes here. But then, having spent so much of her career exploring strange new musical worlds, is it a surprise that Harding might want to sound like something else – to take a turn towards the derivative, if only for a moment? Even so, for adventurous listeners this album is a treat.
