Album of the week with Aldous Harding: Good or bad Enchantress of Oz?

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Musician Aldous Harding

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Emma Wallbanks

Album of the week:

An Aldous Harding album is a bit like a Wes Anderson film, even if that's a comparison as trite as it is forbidden.

Music and cinema work very differently, but can trigger similar feelings: in Anderson's cinema you always feel immediately at home, everything is hyper-real and of stunning beauty, the images embrace you so that you don't even notice how absurd plot ideas are and actions of twisted characters is led onto slippery ice and into very foreign territory.

Aldous Harding could be a character in a Wes Anderson film, a quirky songwriter who can be as stinging as a leather whip, but also as cuddly and soft as the paper airplane soaring through the balmy breeze that Harding might be smiling demonically on fire in the title track lets rise.

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Aldous Harding

Label: 4ad/Beggars Group / Indigo

Label: 4ad/Beggars Group / Indigo

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03/25/2022 6:33 p.m

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You can't trust anything or anyone in Harding's music.

The New Zealand singer's real name is Hannah Sian Topp and with her last two albums »Party« and »Designer« she has made a name for herself in the growing scene of self-confident, compellingly original indie songwriters, including Cate Le Bon and Jenny Hval.

Gloomy

and glowing with smoldering passion, Harding, since "Party" very finely produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey), found more and more catchy pop melodies, behind which their

could be insidiously hidden.

But not really either, think of the wonderfully disturbing video for their song "The Barrel" by "Designer";

the text was about eggs, ferrets and pigeons.

One shouldn't understand all this anyway, rather feel it, stand out, let oneself be carried away.

»I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher.

You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” said the 32-year-old in a recent interview.

So everyone happily philosophizes.

Alright.

Harding gives enough reason to worry (if not worry about her mental balance) on her fourth album.

She hardly sings any of the folk songs, mostly sparsely instrumented with piano or guitar, with the same voice or pitch, she often changes the accent or dialect, sets the wrong tracks or calms the nervous listener with quotations from pop history that seem familiar.

The best example is "Staring At The Henry Moore", a leisurely twirled bossa on the acoustic guitar, which evokes Blondie's "Heart of Glass" in the chorus - and in the middle a shrill sung "Sometaaaaimes" brutally mixes into the foreground, where before was only gently whispered.

certificates

Harding mumbles, breathes and mumbles the words here as if she wanted to make fun of Astrud Gilberto, later in »Passion Babe« the accent is Asian in a seemingly mocking way - or is it just a very harsh Australian-New Zealand slang?

Do we need to debate cultural appropriation with Aldous Harding, or is it just harmless mimicry?

You don't know, just as you don't find out, whether this "Warm Chris" from the title song is a human being or the crystal sung about in the lyrics.

In any case, »Passion Babe« with its accentuated piano shuffle is reminiscent of Joe Jackson and his musically similarly diverse journey of conquest or appropriation »Big World« from the eighties.

In »She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain«, Harding falls into a Western twang and falsetto, which in turn picks up on Neil Young's »After The Goldrush« in the verse, but then wants to take it to the Japanese tea house with shawms and dabbed piano.

"Bubbles" plays with the melody of "I have to go out to the Städele" - in the Judy Garland version.

But is Harding the good or the bad sorceress of Oz?

"Leathery Whip," there it was, the leather whip, finally ends up ringing solemnly with British northern soul and folk, which stylistically underpins the album, authenticated by the throaty backing vocals of Jason Williamson from the Sleaford Mods, while Harding vocals in between shrill Minnie Mouse and velvety Nico alternate - crazy.

"Tick Tock" could also be taken from Lou Reed's "New York" album, except that the cute Belle and Sebastian chorus doesn't quite fit.

Maybe "Ennui", the first and straightest song in all these crooked stylistic exercises and inflections, is the key to this album, which seems to deal with separations and deep personal despair, but also with restlessness and boredom: What is there so tried everything!

With Wes Anderson, despite all the weirdness of the characters and events, it is always about the strict symmetry of the images, on which everything can then be centered and harmonized again.

With Aldous Harding, this ordering element is their feeling for songs that enchant you and won't let you go, even if you can only guess what they mean.

On the way to the championship.

Listened briefly:

Destroyer - »Labyrinthitis«

Another enigmatic one who throws seductive, often voluptuous melodies around and cultivates his mystery: if Aldous Harding's intersectional reference is Wes Anderson, then Dan Bejar aka Destroyer's is the visually stunning Mannerist Renaissance painter Tintoretto, dem on Bejar's 13th album is dedicated to an adorably grumpy (and caustic) song.

Forget everything you've read in interviews with Bejar about his alleged Tom Waits phase: all mischievous smokescreens.

"Labyrinthitis" perfects his exploration of the opulent 70's and 80's yacht rock and lounge funk of his 2011 masterpiece "Kaputt" - and adds some of Bejar's most daring ("June") and catchy pop tunes yet: "Eat The Wine, Drink The Bread" takes the butter off the Pet Shop Boys' bread

»Suffer« makes New Order suffer from the fact that they probably can't pull this off anymore.

»It's In Your Heart Now« Dan Bejar whispers like Kaa the snake right at the beginning for six minutes and lures you into his elaborately decorated labyrinth.

Heart over head in his spell again.

Get Well Soon - »Amen«

Konstantin Gropper, until now the most sympathetic pathos-sadness dumpling of German indie-pop, makes an exceptional attempt on his new album "Amen" with the Pet Shop Boys, but unfortunately only ends up with a rather grumpy Moby copy ("My Home Is My Heart«) or very Swabian Smiths-Schmelz or Billig-Bowie (»Accept Cookies«).

Bad timing: Gropper's beautifully nightmarish final album as Get Well Soon, The Horror, would have been more appropriate for these nasty times, but the 39-year-old shocked to discover a previously unimagined optimism in the midst of the pandemic and is now practicing in anthemic, punchy new songs his knack for resilience and confidence.

»Stop your whining!

You're alright!« he calls out to himself in »A Song For Myself« – and wants to escape from his previously doomed Job existence and his »catholic guilt«.

Works of course only so medium.

The cynical gropper, who in evil songs like "Richard, Jeff And Elon", "Us vs Evil" or "One For The Workout" settles accounts with tech, optimization and conspiracy ideologies, i.e. the new religions, is still better than him still trying something cheerful.

But you believe in him.

Nashi44 – »Asia Box«

"You like yellow slits, well then go to the post office": On this "Asia Box", the title of the first, brilliant EP of the young, Viet-German rapper Nashi44 from Berlin, exoticizing lust newts as well as racist amphibians and other fetishes become fetishes -Have to choke on lollipops: "Suck On My Spring Roll" is the name of one of the most powerful tracks on it.

Even their singles "Aus der Pussy" and "Butterfly" dissected all sorts of dull clichés and fetishes that Asian women are confronted with with razor-sharp beats and frighteningly polished rhymes - and answered the dumb question of where you

come here, nonchalantly: well, out of her mother's pussy.

Nashi44, who fortunately gave up her pop and jazz singing studies in Leipzig to pursue a hip-hop career and now works from Neukölln, is also politically active and gives feminist workshops that deal with hatred of Asian women.

Even the furious seven tracks of her mini-debut are the best weapons for sexy empowerment: "My figure like out of the manga / I'll break his heart like salty sticks in no time / And I know at night my voice will be jerked off to," she raps in "Magic Clit" and confidently refers to female rap pioneer Lil' Kim.

Let's say it in their own words: »Not only lit, but radioactive«.

Please lookup soon!