Aldous Harding’s music is warm and inviting, but it’s never quite clear who’s mailed you the invitation. The New Zealand singer-songwriter wanders around inside her psychedelic folk arrangements, singing in private riddles and changing the tone of her voice from one song (or even one verse) to the next, seemingly oblivious or indifferent to your presence. Despite the many distinct people she embodies, she never struggles to contain her multitudes. She’s like a veteran character actor: You forget, very quickly, to recognize her.
On her career-best album, Train on the Island, Harding steps closer than ever to the camera lens without coming into focus. The lyrics to the sparkling first song, “I Ate the Most,” mimic a harrowing confession: “Sometimes I eat till I vomit/There’s heavy and there’s heavier/I’m nine and I love my mommy/Silver hair and Ritalin/If I’m safe and love is a spectrum.” Harding sings in the hooded, lower end of her range, and the music is filled with nighttime sounds—chittering percussion, organ. The atmosphere is charged, intimate. But somehow, despite having her voice pressed against your ear, you never suspect that this “I” Harding sings about could be, well, Harding. Or perhaps you grasp that Harding understands better than most that the first-person “I” is a temporary garb, liable to assume unrecognizable shapes right in front of the mirror.
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Harding’s work blends instinct with intent—she will surprise herself with an odd lyrical gesture, an unaccountable vocal choice, and then deliberately choose to keep it. “He’s got a new bag/He’s not a new boy,” she sings, repeatedly, on “If Lady Does It.” Is this a riddle assayed by a fairy-tale creature? A suggestion of transformation, possibly gender-related? You are the only interpreter, and the melting signifiers of Harding’s lyrics grin at you without offering assistance. “You laugh at me for keeping feathers/But you don’t see me helping down the naked owl,” she accuses someone on “San Francisco,” and it is true, I suppose: We don’t see her helping down the naked owl. The words settle, glowing, into our subconscious, where we keep the inexplicable things.
Harding has been quietly mapping the coordinates towards Train on the Island over the course of her first four albums, each a little deeper and stranger than the last. These 10 songs represent her ideal playground, a space bright and broad enough for her dreamlike visions and mutable voice to take whatever shapes her imagination allows. On the first single, “One Stop,” she sings a sturdy, bright topline that could have furnished someone less perverse—a late-’90s singer-songwriter, maybe—with a radio hit. But the song is bent in covert ways from the inside, and moves in strange, counterintuitive directions. Over the stair-step piano of the song’s first half, Harding offers images like recounted dreams to a bewildered partner the next morning: “I met the real John Cale/I packed the stage while he ate rice.” Halfway through, the song changes key and Harding begins singing the lines “Why wouldn’t I wanna meet you?/Why wouldn’t I wanna hold you?/Why?” Her voice is slurred, needful, abject. It feels so raw it’s nearly indecent, but it has the distance of a stranger’s panic attack, living inside you in the same unsettled way as overheard sobbing does—all of the desperation reaches you, none of the context.
