MUSIC | RECORDS ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
INDIE FOLK ALDOUS HARDING Designer (4AD) ●●●●● INDIE HONEYBLOOD In Plain Sight (Marathon Artists) ●●●●●
There’s something about Aldous Harding. In an increasingly crowded musical landscape, where there has never been more singer-songwriters, she stands out as a singular talent. But to define Harding as a singer- songwriter is reductive. Her live shows are a beguiling kind of performance art, in which she grimaces, gestures and glares wildly as if something’s gone horribly wrong; her music videos provocative and richly metaphorical in themselves, short films rather than obligations. Better to call Harding an artist, and one who’s undeniably hit her stride with her third album.
Designer is a fascinating collection, full of melody, evocative poetry and exceptional musical arrangements. Lead single ‘The Barrel’ arrives at the halfway point and is the record’s ambiguous centrepiece, a song that could be interpreted as a dissection of all the games surrounding love, sexual awakening, mortality or all of the above. As with all of Designer, it’s best taken as a whole, the musical language of its component parts singing in harmony.
Like 2017’s intense, brooding Party, Designer is produced by John
Parish, who oversees some expertly judged embellishments to Harding’s material. There are the layers of backing vocals on ‘The Barrel’, Claire Mactaggart’s intermittent violin shrieks in ‘Weight of the Planets’, Stephen Black’s soaring clarinet on ‘Zoo Eyes’, and the folk shuffle groove of the standout title track. The album’s second half is more stripped-back but loses nothing in the process; in particular, ‘Damn’ – revolving around a piano ostinato – is disarming in its beauty. Lyrically too, Designer is a treasure trove, full of memorable turns of
phrase. This is a truly exceptional album. (Craig Angus) ■ Out Fri 27 Apr.
Three albums into her career as the driving force behind Honeyblood and Stina Tweeddale’s career feels like it’s been subject to a significant evolution with In Plain Sight, if not quite yet a graduation. That isn’t to say she or her music are lacking in any way here, but rather she’s an artist who might be on course for the premiership, such has her voice and ability grown in bounds over the years; and while this doesn’t yet feel like the record to make her a star, it’s one which has pointed her in the right direction and will wind up the buzz about her.
A significant part of this evolution appears to have been her new collaborator, the producer John Congleton, with whom In Plain Sight was recorded in Los Angeles in late 2018. With the group’s second drummer Cat Myers now departed to play on tour with Mogwai and KT Tunstall, Tweeddale wrote the demos for the record in isolation, and the production has yielded a different, drummerless sound – one with roots in the Riot Grrrl power-pop which Honeyblood perfected on 2016’s Babes Never Die, but with a denser, more electronic style.
It’s tempting to look at Congleton’s other productions and pick out St Vincent or Goldfrapp as useful comparisons, but the raw confidence of Tweeddale’s Edinburgh accent lends itself more to thoughts of Shirley Manson, and she’s such a bright pop songwriter that the Garbage comparison holds water. The sparse, piano-led anti-balladry of closing track ‘Harmless’ aside, In Plain Sight is bright and anthemic, from the driving rock of ‘She’s a Nightmare’ to the Wall of Sound
fuzz of ‘The Third Degree’ and the gleaming electro-glam of ‘Touch’ and ‘You’re a Trick’. Her lyrical allusions are drawn
from the classic rock shelves, many suggesting themes of anger, acceptance and recovery around personal relationships of some kind, and while these make the songs universal, they don’t quite back up the earworm sensibility of the music. Yet it’s an album which delivers in lots of ways, and deserves to advance her reputation yet further. (David Pollock) ■ Out Fri 24 May.
INDIE ROCK IDLEWILD Interview Music (Empty Words) ●●●●● CHAMBER POP C DUNCAN Health (FatCat Records) ●●●●●
Apparently Scottish punk melodists Idlewild were so galvanised by the experience of working on their last album, Everything Ever Written (2015), that the five-piece were back in the studio working on this terrific follow-up mere days after its release. That spirit of enthusiasm for making music together resounds throughout their new LP, from the searing, drum-tumbling drive-rock of ‘All These Words’ (everything ever written, indeed), to the kaleidoscopic indie-gospel of ‘Miracles’ (‘I’m still amazed that days follow days’). Interview Music is Idlewild’s second post-hiatus album, and their reinvigorated
line-up of founders Roddy Woomble (vocals), Rod Jones (guitars) and Colin Newton (drums) – alongside welcome additions Andrew Mitchell (aka Andrew Wasylyk) on bass, and Luciano Rossi (keyboards) – continues to bear rousing fruit. They’re a band shook up, reinvented and revived, yet still rooted in the wayward and euphoric literary punk of their early days in Edinburgh’s mid-90s DIY scene. Woomble has suggested that many songs on Interview Music are about ‘dreams
and dreaming and the thoughts and ideas that can come from this state’. True to this, he explores and sings from various visionary vantage points throughout, from psychedelic prog-pop opener ‘Dream Variations’ (‘I came, I saw, I changed my point of view’), to disco-punk chorale ‘There’s a Place for Everything’, bass ‘n’ brass indie-stomp ‘Mount Analogue’, and closing piano ballad ‘Lake Martinez’ (‘I feel fictional, go deeper into daydreams’).
Until now, the celestial sounds of C Duncan have been created solo from within the confines of his bedroom ‘studio’, essentially one laptop and some tiny top- of-the-range speakers. There, he’d layer up instruments to achieve a rapturous resonance and overdub his choirboy voice to produce an angelic host. But the classically trained Duncan is not one to repeat himself. For his third
album, he’s stepped out of the bedroom and into the world of studio collaboration, recording for the first time with other musicians – including his parents, both classical musicians – in a capacious Salford studio with Elbow’s Craig Potter as producer. Yet this move from his hermetic set-up has come at a time when Duncan has written his most intimate, introspective songs, setting emotionally raw lyrics on relationship break-ups and mental health struggles against the added studio sheen and luxurious layers of the music. That greater polish is evident from the off, on the sleek synth pop of taster single ‘Impossible’ which applies disco strings to bittersweet sentiments about the rigours of a long-distance relationship.
Such overt pop moments alternate with Duncan’s signature sumptuous pastoral
pop. The familiar romantic sweep of ‘Wrong Side of the Door’ is a slow waltz through a gorgeous European melodrama with Duncan delicately declaring ‘now that you’ve gone, I can move on’. Meanwhile, ‘He Came from the Sun’ is a graceful paean, exquisitely orchestrated to ebb and flow as Duncan builds up ‘to
The title track, meanwhile, is a revelation: a five-minute trip through moody post-punk, melancholy classic pop, and some incendiary rock operatics that threaten to knock the Who out the park. It’s a glorious opus from a hard-working, resilient group who, as Woomble recalls, ‘formed a band and learned our own way’. They upturned our pop landscape and charts in the process. ‘Imagine there’s no ground’, he sings. It’s easy if you try. (Nicola Meighan) ■ Out Fri 5 Apr.
tell the world who I really am’. The symphonic jazz funk
grooviness of the blithe ‘Blasé’ belies Duncan’s frustration at its indifferent protagonist, while the smooth, sophisticated ‘Stuck Here with You’ glides along effortlessly, like Steely Dan with the Fifth Dimension on backing vocals, before the album ends with its most heartbreaking juxtaposition of musical peace and lyrical pain. The tranquil choral lullaby ‘Care’ simply resonates to the rafters. (Fiona Shepherd) ■ Out now.
96 THE LIST 1 Apr–31 May 2019