New Zealand’s Aldous Harding, a star on the rise, made her return to the Sinclair in September, performing a set larded with songs from her latest album “Train on the Island” in front of a sold-out Cambridge crowd.
The album title appears to be a reference to an old Appalachian folk song by the same name, but you might as well read into it a shoutout to Harding’s island nation. At a moment streaming is king and the ease of sliding into the online global marketplace tends to steamroll local character in music making, the land of Middle-earth feels just far away and remote enough to produce rare birds such as the flightless kiwi and a pop songwriting culture that hasn’t been A/B-tested into Spotify oblivion.
The artist led a five-piece through an evening of spare, exacting tunes that court pop tradition without feeling derivative, contrived to correspond to their studio versions without flourish, accentuated only by the shifting sands of the singer’s Sphinxlike vocal gifts.
Harding has a riddling voice – it’s amorphous, a wearer of masks and tilting constantly between tragic and comic impressions. If it weren’t for the gut-punch lyrics that suffuse her songwriting, which drop oblique references to sunny topics such as bulimia, alcoholism and loneliness, you might think she was having a laugh at the listener’s expense.
There was no laughing at the Sinclair that night. Harding began the night at the microphone, center stage, backlit so a shadow obscured her face for most of the first half of the set, and plied her way through songs from “Train on the Island” in what might be described as a workmanlike fashion, depending on your workplace.
This workplace was full of hushed silences, longer than usual breaks between songs and a backing band that seemed a little unsure of what the fronter was going to do next. In other words, a tense mood, but the audience was eager to clap its way though any awkwardness. Harding loosened up a bit once she took a guitar in hand and started strumming.
“Leathery Whip,” a song from 2022’s well-received “Warm Chris,” offered the room a chance to hear the band go a little off script, slightly extending the four-minute studio version with a longer crescendo. The studio version incorporates a densely layered profusion of Harding’s “voices,” which could only be gestured at with the help of vocal assistance from her fellow musicians. The live version felt lighter, more spontaneous and slightly relieved at being free of the layers of vocal affectation.
It was no small irony that the artist made a short speech about the value of connecting with the audience before her final song. She hadn’t spoken a coherent word all night to the crowd, and spent half the set cloaked in darkness. The audience roared in approval anyway, as Harding closed with a number that she described as “this song about me.”
Los Angeles’ Sam Burton opened with a set of folk rock redolent of the second wave Laurel Canyon spirit.
