Published March 22, 2022
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New Zealand’s Aldous Harding is a master of negative space. Her ability is quiet: she weaves intimate walls and muted proclamations, pauses, and souls. Short silences and muffled splashes of percussion reinforce the rich emotional crescendos of their songs, often read as surrealistic diary entries, and at other times written as letters and dreams. She mixes metaphors, paints composite memories, and helps to show her inner child. Their elegant bridging of the metaphysical and the mundane resonates with images that sit and grow together, swaying like water droplets. Her work is faithful to subtlety and prudence. Even in interviews she is soft but conscious, seems to measure every word: cautious, unblinking.
Their fourth album Warm Chris – the follow-up to 2019 critically praised Designer – is an exception. Here Harding’s power lies in where she frees herself instead of where she stays. Whimsical, bizarre, and somehow still rich with grace, Warm Chris is a stylistic collage that nevertheless twists and at any moment, the categorization begins to feel plausible.
Harding spent enough time meditating in rough, eerie languages about capital, pleasure, and performance that it was only natural that she finally found a place to play. Their second album Party – of which the title song was a lullaby that suddenly seemed to mourn past, present and future – practically radiated melancholy, emulating the soulful folk of Karen Dalton in the stalking atmosphere of Portishead and accounts of loss and retardation. Designer increases comfort in strange places, fuses more expansive textures of brass and synthesizer with acoustic guitar.
Harding’s bittersweet ruminations were often accompanied by a strange heat, however Warm Chris – produced, als Party in the Designer were, with John Parish – really evoked fire. “Cut it up / Put it in my hand / You’ve become my joy, you understand,” Harding sings after the opening chords of “Ennui”, which are faithfully marching towards anticipatory hum. “Has a little color in the back / I like it.”
It is not just the thematic exchange of grief and consolation for relief and hope that sets in. Warm Chris except Harding’s last three records. Their songs still exist in an emotional world weighed down by anxiety, absence, and the tension between desire and existential truth. In this world, however, these songs dance instead of tempo – the inner child on whom she crucified Designer muttered, smacking on the lips, and stomping with his feet.
Over the course of just ten tracks, Harding attempts a myriad of characters, proving that the instrument of her voice is a superpower of versatility. In the chorus of “Tick Tock”, she deceives and interrupts, “Want to see me / What will you do? / Now that you see me / Tick Tock!” On “Fever,” she talks-sings about disappointment and reunion with the rare rasp of Lucinda Williams in a rolling sea of tin and brass. Even though she sings “I still stare at you in the dark / Looking for the thrill in the nothing”, she almost sounds Victoire.
On the torn title track, Harding’s voice takes on a fleeting shudder, reminiscent of Adrianne Lenker from Big Thief, while on “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” she adopts a waxahatchee-like twang like a banjo shy with a Piano picks. in the background. “Passion Babe” sees her slide between a mumbling draw and childish exclamation marks and acrobatic jumps so subtle that they sound almost effortless. On “Staring at the Henry Moore”, Harding adds the quack of a duck between verses that can be sung by Vashti Bunyan. Their sure-footed voice shifts vary so dramatically on the record that it’s hard to believe, at times, that they are singing alone.
The average is unmistakable, yet in her elastic voice and whimsy-driven instincts – she’s free and she knows it. Without sacrificing the elegance for which she was honored, Harding tries new palettes, painting impressions of small worlds and whatever textures emerge and trusting them as they do. Warm Chris is neither refined nor contained: it wanders and wonders, confirming the pure joy of curiosity. (4AD)
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