Albums of the Year # 6 Aldous Harding - Warm Chris

 

 

I'm certainly not the only person who enjoys Friday mornings, particularly as we make our way into Spring. But I particularly enjoy waking and listening to a new album I've really been looking forward to while getting ready for work, knowing the weekend is coming up at the end of the day.

Such was the case this Friday and the treat I was looking forward to was hearing Warm Chris, the fourth album from New Zealander, Aldous Harding. She's a singular talent, difficult, or rather impossible, to pin down and categorise. Types like me who write about music always need to try to do this to some degree and generally it's manageable with reference points and comparisons. 

What I like most about AH though is her elusive quality. Labels don't define her. Generally she's described as a Folk artist. But Warm Chris like her previous records is not quite like any Folk album you've ever heard, though you can see why the word is applied to what she does. On the Pitchfork site, which is always a good place to go to for particularly ludicrous and unintentionally comic reviews, the writer of the review for this goes to enormous lengths to tie herself and her reader up in knots by detailing how she likes the record very much but doesn't understand it.

But music is really meant to be enjoyed or provoke thought or emotions rather than being coralled in print. Warm Chris is a hugely enjoyable and thought provoking record first and foremost. AH never itemises her thought processes for clinical dissection and this is a prime reason for why I find listening to her so rewarding.

Warm Chris like so many records right now of course is AH's Lockdown record written after moving back to her mother's house in Lyttleton, New Zealand and then recorded in Monmouth, Wales with her long term production collaborator John Parrish. In a recent Guardian interview she describes what she does as 'treading the line between flow state and dissociation - being present and being somewhere else.'

That will do for me. As with my first great musical love R.E.M., who alternatively titled second album Reckoning, File Under Water, the best records need to be listened to and not defined. Warm Chris like Reckoning is a record most of all to be savoured and listened to again and again. That's what I'll be doing over the coming weeks and months.