Aldous Harding -Train on the Island

New Zealand art rock songwriter Aldous Harding grows more puzzling and more fascinating on her fifth album Train on the Island. Much like her last full-length outing, 2022’s Warm Chris, this new set of songs comes on as magnificently lush orchestrated pop, but holds an undercurrent of unsettling weirdness. On the surface, songs like the relaxed and flowing titular track or “One Stop” appear to be straightforward piano-led tunes with light instrumentation and pleasant grooves. But closer listening reveals the abundant eccentricities that make Train on the Island such an engaging and enigmatic experience. Little twists of unexpected instrumentation are where it starts. Several songs inject squiggles of atonal synths at the absolute wrong time, and dramatic, almost jarring arrangement shifts come frequently. Then there’s Harding’s voice, which can take on new shapes multiple times within the same song. Harding sounds like nearly a dozen different characters with different voices and presentations as the album plays out, with lyrical twists that can be confounding and absurd emphasizing the latent uneasiness that becomes the defining characteristic of the songs. This glorious weirdness was present in Harding’s earlier work but feels like the main event on Train on the Island. It never intrudes on what can be enjoyed as fantastically crafted songs, but accentuates the beguiling personality that makes them more than that. ~Fred Thomas, allmusic.com