{"id":655455,"date":"2026-05-07T12:13:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T12:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/655455\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T12:13:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T12:13:07","slug":"aldous-harding-train-on-the-island-review-even-whimsy-resistant-listeners-will-love-these-lucid-luminous-songs-aldous-harding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/655455\/","title":{"rendered":"Aldous Harding: Train on the Island review \u2013 even whimsy-resistant listeners will love these lucid, luminous songs | Aldous Harding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees \u2013 and there are enough of them to warrant her playing three nights at London\u2019s Barbican<\/a> later this month \u2013 she is a strange and endlessly fascinating figure. Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis. On Train on the Island, her fifth album, you\u2019re invited to make some kind of sense of stuff about naked owls, having your face covered with bechamel sauce, seeing \u201cthe real John Cale\u201d silently eating rice, \u201cSicilians reaching over the clams\u201d, and the imponderable lines: \u201cI\u2019m saving myself by eating rocks and plants \/ I pray for the incel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The artwork for Train on the Island<\/p>\n

The curious album covers; the uneasy stage presence and between-song non-sequiturs; the weird costumes; the videos filled with her pulling faces and engaging in awkward choreography; the preponderance of mannered vocal tics and funny accents when she sings, noticeable on Train on the Island\u2019s Worms (vaguely Gallic vowel-stretching) and closer Coats<\/a> (strangulated girlish voice); the halting, elliptical interviews: for fans, this is evidence of true originality in a cookie-cutter era.<\/p>\n

There are, inevitably, others who find all this stuff insufferable, or at least a bit too self-conscious for its own good: as New Order\u2019s Bernard Sumner remarked of fellow Mancunians World of Twist, \u201ca little bit We Are Weird\u201d. Whether you find Harding fascinatingly strange and unique or irksomely contrived is up to you: there\u2019s no universal gauge for the authenticity of weirdness, and one person\u2019s appealingly unbound outlier is invariably another\u2019s irritating pain in the arse. But, as Train on the Island proves, what isn\u2019t really up for question is her skill as a songwriter.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Aldous Harding: Venus in the Zinnia \u2013 video<\/p>\n

The album\u2019s contents don\u2019t stray too far sonically from those of 2022\u2019s Warm Chris<\/a> or 2019\u2019s Designer<\/a>. Like its predecessors, it\u2019s produced by long-term PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, heavily features multi-instrumentalist Huw Evans (better known as left-field singer-songwriter H Hawkline) and settles comfortably into warm, softly psychedelic territory, boundaried by the sparse folk of ballad Riding That Symbol and the electronics that lend opener I Ate the Most the tone of a less agitated Radiohead circa Kid A. In between, the mood tends to the cosy and languorous \u2013 at odds with the occasional lyrical intimation of mental disrepair and medication. The pedal steel is regularly broken out, a harp is deployed to striking effect on the coda of What Am I Gonna Do? and the tracks are driven by acoustic guitar and piano. If it\u2019s not a radical departure, it creates an inviting space in which to linger as its 10 songs unfurl.<\/p>\n

The most striking thing about said songs isn\u2019t their weirdness, but how tightly written, compact and, in their own understated way, punchy they are. Even the longest thing here, the title track that tips over five minutes, never shades into indulgence. The songs that feel episodic never ramble, but deal in impressively acute, stimulating contrasts \u2013 as when One Stop<\/a> and San Francisco move unexpectedly from a hypnotic piano figure and clouds of electric piano respectively into the same, noticeably brighter-hued acoustic guitar-backed refrain. If you aren\u2019t among those listeners inclined to take notes and unravel the lyrics for clues, they work simply as conduits for utterly lovely melodies: the key-shifting Coats, or the sparkling duet between Harding and Evans on Venus in the Zinnia<\/a>, or the tune that snaps What Am I Gonna Do? into sharp focus. As the heavy-lidded Worms makes its slow but sweet progress, it\u2019s hard to imagine even the most vociferous naysayer of Harding\u2019s oddball approach not being at least a little won over.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Of course, if you buy wholeheartedly into the mythology of Harding, there\u2019s plenty here to puzzle over: lines suggestive of neurodivergence, or that seem to pick away at her relationship with her mother, with whom she performed live early on in her career, and who appeared doing martial arts moves in the video for her 2017 single Horizon<\/a>. There\u2019s at least one lyric that seems to be addressed to those eager to interpret what she\u2019s driving at with a shrug: \u201cI\u2019m only riding that symbol,\u201d she sings. \u201cNo one knows what I\u2019m into.\u201d<\/p>\n

But buying into the mythology isn\u2019t a prerequisite for enjoying what\u2019s here. At the heart of Train on the Island lurks stuff that\u2019s rather less complicated than you might expect. A melodically gifted singer-songwriter, music that\u2019s subtle but never bland; these are disarmingly straightforward pleasures that all the strangeness \u2013 mannered or otherwise \u2013 can\u2019t obscure.<\/p>\n

This week Alexis listened to<\/p>\n

Ashnymph \u2013 Island in the Sky
Propulsively danceable, slightly unsettling, with a layer of grime that doesn\u2019t entirely conceal a sweet melody: Ashnymph continue to plough their own weird furrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees \u2013 and there are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":["post-655455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}