'Aldous Harding' by Aldous Harding

Aldous Harding

by Aldous Harding

Release date: July 25th 2015

Tracklist: Stop Your Tears / Hunter / Two Bitten Hearts / Titus Groan / Beast / No Peace At All / Merriweather / Small Bones of Courage / Titus Alone //

Quite often, while talking to my brother he'll give me suggestions of music he thinks I'll like - he's generally right the majority of the time (that I'll like the music he's suggested). This time, he introduced me to Aldous Harding (Hanna Harding) and her self-titled debut album. So far, I've listened to it through an entirety of once and now, for the rest of the evening, it's going to be on repeat. It's a beautiful album, delicate and emotive, demonstrating a level of care, elegance and fragility that I haven't heard in an album before this - it really is stunning.

Stop Your Tears is haunting, the choral singers edited to pan in and out of the sound completely accompanied by the delicately picked guitar, when her voice appears – sounding traditionally folk with this tender strength. There is so much anguish and grief in the lyrics, “I will never marry my love / I will die waiting for the bells / Death, come pull me underwater / I have nothing left to fear from hell”, you wonder how it’s possible for someone so young to feel this much pain. Her voice portrays this and her lyrics accompany full of calamitous imagery of death, drowning’s, pills, and her lost faith in God.

Her voice fits her music perfectly, this voice that’s accompanied by the fiddle, guitar, and percussion, lamenting stories of tragedy and hopelessness. This beautifully bittersweet track, Stop Your Tears, is the epitome of the rest of the album; this standard that you hear just from the opening track set is met until the very last song. Two Bitten Hearts is introduced so delicately with a melodic motif on the electric guitar before this languish violin line joins in to set up the rest of song so well. There are little elements that add to the already built poignant soundscape so well, such as having a tenor vocalist to harmonise with her unique voice. The haunting soundscape is initially built from the strength and diversity that her voice portrays, but these intricate and well-placed elements push that atmosphere created even further.

For once, in an album, an artist has really explored their music and taken full advantage of playing and discovering where the tracks take them. For music these days, songs that last for more than three and a half minutes is a rare thing, however for this collection of songs it’s the complete opposite. Aldous Harding takes advantage of this and goes where her songs take her – that being five to six minutes of beautifully executed music (with the odd occasion of a track just under three minutes).

I’m surprised at how little I’ve heard about this album – that being pretty much nothing. It’s a beautiful emotive album with so much to discover within each song. In one of the few reviews that I found and read, they said how her voice feels out of place in the 21^st Century with such a traditional folk sound but that’s a good thing – there’s so much contemporary and commercial folk music being released at the moment and finally here’s something a little different, exploring old and new roots of the genre. The album is full of sadness and is a heavy one to bear, but she sings beautifully about a period that feels heart wrenching, and feels clearly like a difficult period in her life. However, that feels like she’s given a part of herself to everyone who has the fortune to hear it, and that to me is the sign of a brilliant musician.