I’ve been quite transfixed by this record since I bought it at Harding’s recent Melbourne Folk Club gig. It’s literate female folk, somewhere in the Joanna Newsom/Tiny Ruins kind of realm, but I’ve found a connection with it I don’t get from similar artists.
Opening track Stop Your Tears is Aldous Harding in a nutshell for me; it’s an impressionistic pastiche of pain, longing, beauty and feminine wisdom which belies the tender age of the woman singing it. This kind of mellow mournfulness and haunting musicality carries far more weight for me than the scarred ‘poor me’ storytelling so present in the popular music of some of her contemporaries. There’s an almost medieval bent to some of Harding’s lyrical content but it’s no gimmick; the occasionally folkloric imagery serves instead to underpin the timelessness of human experience.
However, the album is not mired in tales of mead-fuelled battles or underscored by lyres and Gregorian chants. Some of the production is thoroughly modern and more reminiscent of Beck or Bjork than it is of Beowulf. Marlon Williams also has a few fingerprints on this album; his echoic backing vocals perfectly compliment the gentle strength of Harding’s delivery in tracks like Titus Groan and gospel-esque Merriweather. While much of the production is quite sparse there are still some more energetic songs in the mix, and the raw nature of the recordings really highlights both the frailty and the strength of the performances.
Maybe I just needed a strong woman around while my lady was away this past month, but I think my attachment to this record comes more from the gravitas of the songwriting than from missing my girl. Harding captures the essence of the grieving widow, the nurturing mother, the blushing virgin and the warrior princess each in turn with an understated intelligence that is, at times, jaw-dropping. I played a couple tracks for my lady when she got home and she almost cried. ‘Nuff said.
BY JULIAN DOUGLAS
Best Track: Stop Your Tears
If You Like This, You’ll Like These: Vashti Bunyan, Nick Drake, Tiny Ruins.
In A Word: Boadicea
