About two paragraphs into the AllMusic biography for Aldous Harding (née Hannah Harding) we learn that the New Zealander came to music as a fallback option from her dream of becoming a veterinarian. It’s not clear how that dream died, or if it did, but her latest album Warm Chris marks her fourth full-length album and finds her officially planted within the airy and sometimes arid soil of an indie pop career.
If there’s any hand wringing over the path not taken, she can console herself with all she’s accomplished to the present. A well-received self-titled debut album in 2012. Signed to 4AD. Enlisted the services of John Parish (Sparklehorse, PJ Harvey) to co-produce the follow-up album Party, which was nominated for album of the year in New Zealand. Designer followed in 2017. And Warm Chris in 2022 finds Harding in fine form.
Her fourth album presents a confident songwriter in full possession of a sense of adventure and experimentation. The musical roots in Warm Chris are folk, but they feed a plant of pure pop minimalism. Do not look for meaty, involuted solos or soaring, tentpole orchestration. Often a single hook of absurd simplicity – a few notes tapped on the piano keys – will form the bedrock of the entire song. The simple hooks are recorded with a satisfying warmth that reminds you how beautiful instruments by themselves can sound, without syrupy add-ons of filters or effects.
Simplicity, though, can be a crafty disguise for subterranean complexity. Harding has a gift for picking the right sonic accompaniment in the right spot that will pull the rug out from under the listener, turning a quaint ditty into a much stranger exercise. It might be the buzzing drone of a brass horn or the tinkling piano in “Ennui”, or it might be a quacking duck effect (?) that makes a brief cameo at the end of “Staring at the Henry Moore”. The transition, however it goes, remains subtle. Like you’re skating along the edge of a light trip, at a certain point you look up and find yourself in a different part of the universe, before being gently dropped off at your doorstep by Harding’s light touch at the end of the song.
Harding has received some comparisons to a favorite pandemic ingénue, Adrianne Lenker. The comparison is mostly spurious, but there are several flights throughout the record that showcase the fragile and fractured folkie croon we sometimes associate with Lenker, or an early Joanna Newsom, or any number of accomplished singer-songwriters in the tradition. Check out title track “Warm Chris” or “Bubbles”. When that folky strain is coupled with good ol’ Appalachian instrumentation, like the keys shadowed by banjo plucks on “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain”, the vocal sympathy between Harding and the folky tradition is even stronger. But you have to sit down and listen to what Harding does with this tradition and these traditional elements – her “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” deconstructs and reconstructs the corny kiddie version into something entirely new.
Of all the instruments at her disposal, the vocals, indeed, might be Harding’s favorite toy. Her singing style has a chameleon-like quality. It’s hard to pin down. One is reminded of early Beck’s use of vocals – when he was more analog than digital – as a catchall noisemaker when no available instrument or FX pedal would do the job. Harding warps and coaxes her voice into various guises to find the right mood or texture for the song.
Sometimes her musical choices are downright bizarre. She pairs an über-cool Nico-delivery with a high pitch Munchkin-voice accompaniment on “Leathery Whip.” And perhaps it’s just the curious topography of the Kiwi accent, but on tracks “Tick Tock” and “Lawn” her voice sure sounds like a mocking sendup of “asian” chanteuserie á la Cibo Matto or whatever tongue-in-cheek, postmodern musical mashup you like. Fans of more conventional vocal parsing will appreciate the deeper ranges of her voice on “Fever”.
Warm Chris is a grower of an album. It comes on slow – pretty, though, you suspect, a bit lightweight. With further listens intriguing patterns emerge and the personality of each song grows like a shelf full of planted pots of strange seedlings. The roots grow deeper with each listen. Let them grow. Listen to the album a few times all the way through on a long drive to or from the country. Whether or not the plants take root for many more seasons, or Harding folds up camp after a plentiful harvest and heads back to veterinary school (It’s never too late! Look at Rodney Dangerfield in Back To School. With a little effort and a lot of partying, he gets his diploma in his 60s. Sure, he earned all Ds in the final exam – except for one A from the lovely Dr. Diane Turner – but, as they say, “Ds get degrees.”), Warm Chris is worth your loving attention.
