My running theory is that Aldous Harding lives on a cloud, or in a big air bubble floating somewhere in the Pacific, or inside a medieval castle, or hidden in a big stalactite-covered cavern, or on a neighboring planet just like ours but with the saturation turned up to 120 percent. It’s the only way I can rationalize Harding’s strange, arresting view of the world. Her weirdness is charming to many but grating to others. She’s wearing a strange hat. She’s forgoing her natural falsetto for a brusque, semi-convincing Liz Phair impression. She’s pockmarking her lyrics with nonsensical word salad. For years, I have been attempting—to no avail—to decipher whether having “Zoo Eyes” would be a desirable trait or a horrifying one.
Still, I’m not among Harding’s detractors. The Kiwi musician’s strangeness has always endeared me to her; in a sea of indie-pop homogeny, her iconoclasm is a welcome change of pace. One can imagine my relief, then, that on Train On The Island, Harding’s humanoid passport hasn’t quite come through the mail. The ten-song album is just as peculiar as its predecessors—a minimalist, open-hearted jaunt through the twisty-turny annals of Harding’s incomprehensible brain. She’s supported here by John Parish, as well as pedal steel player Joe Harvey-Whyte, harpist Mali Llewelyn, synth player Thomas Poli, drummer Sebastian Rochford, and multi-instrumentalist Huw Evans, whose light, dreamy accompaniments beautifully buoy Harding’s idiosyncrasies.
But it is not, oddly enough, foreignness that defines Harding’s latest venture; despite its eccentricities, Train On The Island is an album full of emotions, memories, and strains toward belief so recognizable they feel borrowed from one’s own life. Exhibit A: “One Stop,” the album’s freewheeling lead single. A lone piano arpeggio—Harding is, as always, an undeterred proponent of instrumental minimalism—opens into the singer’s coy thesis statement: “I’ve been away too long.” (It’s true, by the way: Warm Chris was four years ago—a decade in indie terms.) The song pulses with anticipation, begging to burst free until, in its final minute, melting into a loose acoustic loop and rococo wiggle.
That balance between control and abandon waits in the record’s greatest tensions, both in lyric and melody. Harding’s lines are economical yet evocative: on the aforementioned “One Stop,” she notes sincerely, “I met the real John Cale / He had no words, but it’s alright,” before finding the punchline: “I packed the stage while he ate rice.” On her delightful duet with Parish, “Venus in the Zinnia,” she burbles, “I cut my hair / Nobody loved it.” That both distinct memories and universal experiences (who among us has not confronted the universal “To bangs or not to bangs?” dilemma) can be expressed in Harding’s whimsical, no-nonsense prose is an achievement in itself. Actually, the fact that Harding’s prose manages to be simultaneously whimsical and no-nonsense might be an even greater one. The two words are not often neighbors. In Train On The Island, they’re roommates.
Despite its sparseness, Train On The Island becomes a boisterous, neo-twee sense of sport in a world Harding refuses to see as dreary. On “Coats,” the album’s zingy closer, she puts on a rumbly alto as she asks, “What do you say when you meet blue women?”—an apparent reference to the album’s impish cover. Thrashing electric guitars and sparkly backing vocals give the finale a satisfying crash. But sometimes the whimsy veers into riddle: on “I Ate the Most,” between barely-couched references to an eating disorder, she calls love “sweet like lemon”; the album dawns with the exhorted couplet, “I’m not afraid, like you’re not gay / And you’re not old, like I’m on the spectrum.” In moments like these, Harding’s lyrics become puzzles you have to squint at to solve.
This is not to say, then, that Train On The Island is totally playful. A Hammond organ lingers through “Worms,” a haunted song that sees ambient unease dissolve into languid piano balladry. “I’m saving myself by eating rocks and plants,” Harding sighs. “I pray for the incel.” The beseeching “San Francisco” reflects on broken youthful desires, blossoming into a full-bodied version of a refrain first encountered on “One Stop.” As the song bursts into its backend, transitioning from a lonely diad of Fender Rhodes chords into a strummed pattern, Harding circles back to a question that embodies the life and yearning that Train On The Island gently cradles. She repeats, over and over: “Why wouldn’t I wanna meet ya?”
Train On The Island is both capacious and intimate, a twinkly world trapped in a shaken snowglobe. In Aldous Harding’s signature stripped-back style, she accomplishes the near-impossible feat of presenting universal experiences in language only she could write, stamping her verse and motion onto every beat. It’s a record to play while sunning, buying groceries, or entering a life crisis. The music will make sense each time. Malleable yet singular, Train On The Island keeps one foot planted on solid ground and the other stepping through a portal into Harding’s weird and wild imagination. It’s a silly, colorful triumph. [4AD]
Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.
