The New Zealand artist continues to develop her pointillist universe in its stark clarity. And she achieves the feat of making us feel elsewhere while remaining close to us.
Nine or ten titles, stripped of frills and arranged to form an album that is almost traditionally pop, is never more than enough for Aldous Harding to summon her magic. This art of pared-down aesthetics — almost pointillist — which she has transposed, in turn, to the anxiety inherent in Southern Gothic, to counter-cultural reveries influenced by Laurel Canyon, or to the golden age of the New York avant-garde, is more than merely a nostalgia for the last century.
Without wishing to conjure the unspeakable Lovecraftian creatures, the music of the New Zealander has always been more than it appeared (a practical case of the “more than meets the eye”). As if the thirty-something artist operated from a plane of reality inaccessible to us, and she would allow us to glimpse it through a Judas — a tiny tear in the fabric of the universe.
A kind of hyperrealism transcends this new record
In this duplicity that is both reassuring and terrifying, the one who never shies away from the task of expressing what unfolds in her jagged, mutant lyrics stitches together once again the framework of her fifth album, Train on the Island. For Aldous Harding’s unsettling strangeness continues to function at full blast.
With lines shaped like mystical tweets at the opening I Ate the Most or the enigmatic punchline at the heart of the single One Stop (“I met the real John Cale / He had nothing to say but I don’t care / I tidied up the stage while he ate rice.”), a kind of hyperrealism transcends this new record. Yet, Train on the Island could not be a postmodern album in the manner of Lana Del Rey, the Americana priestess, nor the product of a detached affectation like Bar Italia.
Carried by her protean, perpetually shifting voice that probes our otherness, this new release arrives from elsewhere once again. As in her hypnotic concerts, Aldous Harding and her alien folk pull us in with this Train on the Island.
Train on the Island (4AD/Wagram). Release on May 8. In concert at Salle Pleyel, Paris, on June 12.
