Aldous Harding fixes a person in the front row of this tiny venue with a basilisk stare. It seems to last an age. Really, it’s just the matter of a few hushed and pregnant bars of fingerpicked guitar. Then the extraordinary New Zealand folk singer pouts, juts her chin out like Keith Richards, manspreads her white-trousered legs on her stool, rolls her eyes back and opens her mouth. “Swell does the skull,” she intones, extending the letters, almost as though English isn’t her first language. Moments later, Harding buzzes her lips to the microphone, playing a flute solo without the flute.
The song is a tapestry of specific details and oblique leaps. “There’s honey on the bread now,” she notes, voice swooping low. On Harding’s recently released second album, Party, that line is sung by celebrated American troubadour Perfume Genius; on the recording, their voices bleed into one another uncannily. On this tour, Harding is accompanied by Huw Evans (who plays as H Hawkline) on the odd backing murmur, electronic keys and additional guitar. Two nights after they play this south London watering hole, Harding will make her UK TV debut on Later… With Jools Holland and this coterie of spellbound fans is sure to expand exponentially. Because Harding is nothing less than amazing – a nuanced musician, a startling writer and a presence so intense you can’t help but worry that her compelling theatricality might overshadow her other strengths.
The best artists divide as much as they unite. By now even casual music consumers will know where they stand on the delivery of Joanna Newsom, Björk or Anohni. Harding sings an uneasy love song, Party (the album’s title track), as though she were an Icelandic mosquito; the hallucinatory What If Birds Aren’t Singing, They’re Screaming is pitched low and mumbly. “I got high and I thought I saw an angel,” she croons, grinning.
Evolved though Harding’s fingerpicking is, her colour coordination (all white, including guitar), her Chrissie Hynde fringe, her confrontational stares and her bass-faces belie the folk musician tag. The textural leap from her self-titled first album (2014, Flying Nun) to Party (4AD) is one of greatly expanded ambition: a flavour of cabaret, a little jazz.
Every now and again there are sonic shocks to the system that undercut the atmosphere of otherworldliness. One of Harding’s finest songs, Imagining My Man, packs in some cheery backing shouts: “Hey!” yells a disembodied chorus from the pre-recorded backing. “Yes!”
We get most of Party and one new song, Weight of the Planets, that Harding says will be on her next album. “I’ve been over that night in my head,” she begins. It is one of those lines written and sung in such a way as to make you crave the rest of the story.
“If there’s a song you can laugh about, it’s this one,” Harding informs us at the start of Living the Classics, a velvety-soft few minutes that recall the faster cuts of Elliott Smith. It’s so rich in detail that you are tempted to read autobiographically. “Living the classics,” she sings, “gonna make my own/ Put it on a disc.” Well, Party is that – an instant classic of an album.
The song, like most Harding efforts, only gets more intriguing, however. “Win the money back,” she murmurs. “Take Mum to Paris and jump on the big beds.” You cannot help but hope the beds are just as Harding’s narrator imagines them.
