Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees, 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 are invited to make sense of stuff about naked owls, having your face covered with bechamel sauce, seeing 'the real John Cale' silently eating rice, 'Sicilians reaching over the clams', and the imponderable lines: 'I'm saving myself by eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel.'
The curious album covers, uneasy stage presence, between-song non-sequiturs, weird costumes, videos filled with faces and awkward choreography, preponderance of mannered vocal tics and funny accents, and halting elliptical interviews: for fans, this is evidence of true originality in a cookie-cutter era. There are inevitably others who find this stuff insufferable or too self-conscious. Whether you find Harding fascinatingly strange or irksomely contrived is up to you. But as Train on the Island proves, what is not really up for question is her skill as a songwriter.
Album Sound and Production
The album's contents do not stray far sonically from those of 2022's Warm Chris or 2019's Designer. Like its predecessors, it is produced by long-term PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, heavily features multi-instrumentalist Huw Evans, and settles comfortably into warm, softly psychedelic territory. 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 bound this territory. In between, the mood tends to the cosy and languorous, 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 is not a radical departure, it creates an inviting space in which to linger as its 10 songs unfurl.
Songwriting Highlights
The most striking thing about these songs is not their weirdness, but how tightly written, compact, and punchy they are. Even the longest track, 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. For example, 'One Stop' 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 are not 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', the sparkling duet between Harding and Evans on 'Venus in the Zinnia', 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 is hard to imagine even the most vociferous naysayer of Harding's oddball approach not being at least a little won over.
Mythology and Interpretation
If you buy wholeheartedly into the mythology of Harding, there is 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'. There is at least one lyric that seems to be addressed to those eager to interpret what she is driving at with a shrug: 'I'm only riding that symbol,' she sings. 'No one knows what I'm into.' But buying into the mythology is not a prerequisite for enjoying what is here. At the heart of Train on the Island lurks stuff that is rather less complicated than you might expect. A melodically gifted singer-songwriter, music that is subtle but never bland; these are disarmingly straightforward pleasures that all the strangeness cannot obscure.
