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Washing your hands has a negative exception: not caring. Sanitizing your hands is a sign of care. And not just for oneself. In this, it hides, but not too much, a certain grace. Aldous Harding, born Hannah Topp, a New Zealander transplanted to Cardiff, performs this specific operation with her new album, standing apart from the predecessors; she does so with an attention—shared with producer John Parish—that relaunches and returns an image that is serpentine and more indefinite. Primarily desiring to deepen a previously begun dialogue, but perhaps too tenuous, with her niche; thus, we have this fourth album, "Warm Chris."
Gleaming between shadows; vital among slow water surface breathes; with an author who tears the pages from her notebook at opposite halves: on one side the dreamlike substance and on the other her defined talent. And then, she randomly reassembles those pages. Thus, in her compositions (calm, stored, and somewhat unpredictable), the moon and the sun appear, but you don't know if it's day or night; thus, infatuation appears, but you don't know if it has ended or is beginning. Thus, you think you are immersed in a bucolic tale, but perhaps you're on the edge of a scorching asphalt road without a destination. So, at the edge, you fall, without causing yourself much pain. And the dizziness arrives even the next day. You're dazed.
We are in the realms of 4AD, a true guarantee. Haldous Harding's indie folk has a singer-songwriter strength that catches you off guard because it's unexpected and restless: there's not the dramatic intensity of the debut—dazzling, to say the least, truly fierce—nor the arty finesse of the two previous works for the British label, but a new surreal passage, a narrow path that takes you deep into an enchanted world, inside or outside, spectator of it but involved:
"Closer to you is no longer closer to me"
"Turn back
Turn back and let it be in the right place"
"I still gaze at you in the dark
Looking for that thrill that comes from nothing
You know, my favorite place is the beginning"
"And the people who want me don't have the things I'm looking for
No way
And here, life resumes with its leathery whip,”
with a phlegmatic, seductive, fairy-tale singing that declaims in bursts, stopping suddenly, even at the peak, instead of expanding, and starts again more concrete or, on the contrary, more ineffable. So do the apparently minimal chords and the barebones instrumentation. It takes little for us to dream or it's not worth staying awake too long.
And it's so nice to have one less veterinarian in New Zealand and one more songwriter in the global village in this 2022.
I sat down, I had to, then lay down to listen to those songs: Ennui, Fever, Warm Chris, Starting at the Henry Moore, the concentric choirs of Leathery Whip. But I saw only clouds. And stars.
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