Aldous Harding has stopped giving interviews, which is fine because the interviews never told you much anyway. What Train on the Island tells you is a different kind of problem: more biographical than anything she’s made before, full of images specific enough to feel true but arranged in an incomplete way.
“I cut my hair, nobody loved it,” she sings on ‘Venus in the Zinnia’. “I was nine when I left my body,” on ‘Coats’. The details arrive with the texture of fact. What they add up to is a question the album keeps asking without answering.
Producer John Parish, Harding’s collaborator across four albums now, gives the record his usual precision and, on the better tracks, the space to go somewhere he couldn’t have predicted.
The arrangement for ‘What Am I Gonna Do?’ opens on Mali Llywelyn’s harp driving a rhythm that starts like a hand-whittled version of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ – bouncing, urgent, slightly wrong-footed – and then the music drops entirely. Harding sings alone: “What am I gonna do if I can’t break out of it / What am I gonna do if they can’t train me out of it?”
The production coming back after that makes the oblique grammar surrounding it feel earned rather than habitual. It’s the most exposed moment on the record.
‘If Lady Does It’ moves with a blues-jazz prowl, Harding’s voice at its most controlled, the repeated title phrase loaded with impatience before the track lands on “If I am a gun then I’m loaded” – the sharpest line she’s written in years, arriving with the timing of someone who’s been working up to it for four minutes without letting on.
‘One Stop’ is where the album sets its formal terms: the refrain that circles without resolving, the possibly-real John Cale encounter (“He had no words but I don’t mind”), the question that returns later in ‘San Francisco’ without an answer.
I find myself slightly less convinced by the shorter tracks. ‘Worms’ is dark and conversational without landing a moment. ‘Riding That Symbol’ contains the album’s most revealing lyric – “I’m only riding that symbol / No one knows what I’m into” – in its shortest, most abrupt housing, and ends before it quite begins. The lone dissenting critical voice calls the album a mixed bag and places it near the back of her catalogue. That’s too hard, but the uneven second half gives the criticism something to stand on.
What I keep returning to is the album’s title: a train that cannot exist, crossing water that cannot be crossed. Harding knows she’s riding a symbol. The music keeps moving because stopping would mean arriving somewhere, and arriving somewhere would mean being pinned down, and being pinned down is precisely what nine years of this particular artistic method has been designed to avoid.
Whether that’s freedom or evasion is the question Train on the Island puts in your hands and leaves there. I think it’s freedom, mostly. I’m not entirely sure, which feels like the point.
