New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding performs with a splintered vocal style, modulating her tone so often that you might not realize that two of her songs, or even two verses within one song, were sung by the same artist. While some elements of that style, such as her languid enunciation and breathy timbre, are consistent throughout her fourth album, Warm Chris, the difference between, say, her high-on-helium cooing on “Lawn” and throatier delivery on “Passion Babe” is surprising and dramatic.
By contrast, Harding’s creative voice is singular in its unexpectedly beguiling austerity. Her sparse and slyly suggestive lyrics, accompanied by pared-down instrumentals, telegraph both emptiness and defiant desire throughout the album, exploring the negative spaces around love and relationships: yearning, anticipation, and separation.
In keeping with Harding’s loneliness, much of the album’s first half feels rigid, as if she were poised to trip and fall over an errant chord. “Tick Tock,” a slick and simple acoustic come-on, feels so measured that it makes Harding’s 2019 single “The Barrel” seem exuberant by comparison. Still, her impressionistic lyrics—“What you gonna do now that you see me?”—crystallize just enough for the subtle seduction to take effect.
After “Tick Tock,” you might expect Harding to let us in on the romance, but with “Fever” she skips straight to its aftermath, where desire has fizzled. The song’s drums are loud and precise, setting a staunchly even pace that echoes the plodding end of a passionless relationship. “I still stare at you in the dark,” Harding sings, “looking for that thrill in the nothing.”
The singer commits even further to her fruitless search for affection on the title track, with a pastoral quality that brings to mind the saddest songs on Vashti Bunyan’s cult classic Just Another Diamond Day. As Harding sings, “You make that impossible face/You make it impossible,” her words become increasingly indistinct, her dreamy lethargy disrupted occasionally by brief electronic guitar interjections. In a song about absence and desire, it’s an eminently clever choice to shatter the minimalism only fleetingly.
While the back half of Warm Chris features its two most morose songs, the piano and vocal-driven “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” and the loungey “Bubbles,” the album also loosens up during this stretch, introducing an even greater variety of vocal modifications and undulant changes in pace. Closer “Leathery Whip” channels gospel with its church organ and jangling tambourine, and Harding matches the reverent instrumentation with an equally solemn performance. Still, it’s hard not to smile as she sings, “Here come life with his leathery whip,” her tone low and jaw stiff like the most serious of clerics.
In comparison, the blithe and whispery “Staring at the Henry Moore” sounds unaffected, minus a single apelike (and hilarious) “ooh-ah-ah.” With such emotional fluctuations, Warm Chris avoids slipping into the rut of self-pity we might associate with music about lovelessness and loneliness. Instead, Harding continues to exercise her versatility and restraint, delivering an album that invites close attention and rewards it with understated surprises.
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