Aldous Harding live at Hana-Bi, Ravenna – August 22nd 2017
Aldous Harding at Hana-Bi
The striking stage presence and breathtaking vocal dexterity of New Zealand’s Aldous Harding is a thrill to behold.
The assured body language and the way she makes eye contact with members of the audience is in equal measures flirty and defiant. She is warm and genial between songs but then is like a woman possessed while singing. The focus and feeling this generated gave me goosebumps.
Her one hour set,accompanied by Invisible Familiars (Jared Samuel) on keyboards, begins where the new album, Party, ends.
In her song by song guide on NPR, she talks of ‘Swell Does The Skull’ as having the same “archaic fume” that fired the gothic folk songs on her self titled debut album but the baseball cap wearing Indie Girl who graced the cover of that record has evidently grown up and moved on.
The disarming title track – part love song, part murder ballad – exemplifies the greater maturity and confidence.
The new album is produced by John Parish and I’m guessing she chose him mainly because his work with P J Harvey. As artists, Harvey and Harding are quite different yet both adopt a semi-confessional tone while retaining the detached air of born storytellers.
Imagining My Man, for example, is a torch song that becomes a bit pop – like Nico lightening up. “You were right, love takes time” could be a line from Adele but Harding is part of a much darker universe. It sounds like an internal dialogue between the shy, insecure person she once was and the self-assured woman she is now.
Harding’s songs draw upon a series of dichotomies: sin vs salvation, princess vs demon, sunshine vs darkness, fragility vs strength. Most of the time she takes the second of these two options.
Her astonishing vocal range creates different perspectives in her songs, it’s a voice that can switch mid-song between soulful maturity to a kind of girly parody, like Karen Dalton morphing into Joanna Newsom.
Singing in tongues like this gives an exciting sense of an artist who realizes that you can still be dramatic without sounding tormented; the demons come out just the same.
Watch the videos for Stop Your Tears and Blend back to back and you’ll see what I mean. This is woman whose days of crawling in the mud are past. Where once she played the part of a maiden in distress, now she a woman who is not shy about asserting her needs and affirming her sexuality.
Live, as on record, it is the contrasts that make her so charismatic. For the encore, she does a cover of Paul McCartney’s, Single Pigeon, a playful ditty that couldn’t be more different from the high drama of the closing song, Horizon.
If she’s doing a show anywhere near you, do yourself a favor and go see her and prepare to be amazed.
