Skip to main content

Designer

It would have been in 2015, between the release of her debut album and her first visit to the UK, that I first heard of Aldous Harding. I was intrigued from the outset, but not quite enough to make any purchases. Nor did what I heard of her second album Party persuade me to reach for my wallet. It was only when I saw the video for 'The Barrel', the first one made to promote her third album Designer in 2019, that things clicked into place, and I ordered it on CD. I'd already heard 'The Barrel' on the radio a couple of times, but I had failed to appreciate it before seeing it visualised.

It's a soft and slow record that gets even quieter and slower toward the end. Recorded not so far from here up at Rockfield Studios near Monmouth, Harding was joined by some Welsh musicians like H. Hawkline, Gwion Llewelyn and Stephen "Sweet Baboo" Black. Producer John Parish also contributed a variety of instrumental parts and backing vocals. The closing two tracks, on the other hand, are solo ones, with Harding accompanying herself on guitar on 'Heaven is Empty' and piano on 'Pilot'.

One of the most striking aspects of the album is Harding's way of changing her voice from song to song, as if assuming a different persona for each one. Her lyrics are usually oblique and often opaque, yet there is always a feeling that something is being communicated, and it's not obscurity for its own sake. It's not a record where it seems worthwhile picking specific favourite tracks, as the whole thing is a great pleasure from start to finish.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more