Aldous Harding Invites Us to Question It All on “Train on the Island”
Train on the Island album cover
Aldous Harding’s fifth studio album, Train on the Island, may appear quiet and calm on first listen, but when you look deeper under the surface, it’s a gut-wrenching and introspective look at herself… or someone. It’s unclear who.
Coming off the success of her fourth album, Warm Chris, Harding turns to face the mirror, but finds it smudged and unrecognizable. There’s a cloud of doubt and uncertainty that lingers throughout the entire album, and just when you think you may have gotten a grasp on what is going on, the track switches, and you’re back in unfamiliar territory.
The opening track, “I Ate the Most,” is almost dread-inducing with the questions it leaves the listener. “I’m not afraid like you’re not gay,” Harding opens in a lower tone of her vocal register than we expect to hear. “And you’re not old like I’m on the spectrum.” We don’t know who this song is about, so we won’t know the answer to her similes. The whole album is full of these inside stories that we require to give insight.
“I feel that I feel the most / You are through with me on your shoulders / I can prove that I ate the most cause I did.”
This is a private world we’ve stumbled into. We don’t know how we got here or how to get out. It’s a world of contradictions and staircases to nowhere. It exists within the work of M.C. Escher, each staircase leading to a dead end. We continue, certain that the next track will lead to a track that enlightens us and clues us into what is going on here.
The stand-out track, “What Am I Gonna Do?” is a sprawling landscape that seems to unfold in front of the listener and ends a brilliant three-track run preceded by “If Lady Does It” and “San Francisco.”
On “What Am I Gonna Do?” she glides across the surface of a perfectly gorgeous soundscape with the expert precision of a figure skater, taking small and short breaks to plead, “What am I gonna do if I can’t break out of it? What am I gonna do? They can’t train me out of it. What am I gonna do?” Before we can process this piercing look under the veil, she’s back onto the ice, gliding away from us.
Backed by harmonies reminiscent of Fiona Apple and set against an ever-present drum that conveys urgency and a hope of arriving at some sort of catharsis or answer to her question. But again, in keeping with the theme of the album, Harding posits the question and leaves us to answer it ourselves.
While there is some clear inspiration for Harding in the likes of Fiona Apple, this is a unique sound that sounds familiar but is hard to pin down. It’s not that it sounds like anything we’ve ever heard before. It’s that it sounds so unlike anything that we spend our time trying to pin down an influence to give us comfort and any form of regulation to the sprawling soundscape that is Train on the Island.
The last song on the album, “Coats”, sees Harding singing at the upper part of her register, contrasting the opening song, “I Ate the Most”. On this, she sings the nonsensical “Big thick coats on the dogs of people just trying to help.” This lyric finalizes what we’ve known throughout the entire album. We’ll never know or understand what Harding is talking about. She’s an enigma. She’ll stand on the stage completely unknown to us and embrace this role. From this, we have to derive our own meaning or be driven mad, as she seemingly has.
You can listen to Train on the Island on your preferred streaming service or purchase it from 4ad’s website here.