{"id":114,"date":"2019-12-12T23:56:16","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T23:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.richbradley.org\/songs\/?p=114"},"modified":"2020-04-25T17:54:52","modified_gmt":"2020-04-25T17:54:52","slug":"fixture-picture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.richbradley.org\/songs\/201x-favorites\/fixture-picture\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cFixture Picture\u201d \u2013 Aldous Harding"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Aldous Harding - Fixture Picture (Official Video)\" width=\"780\" height=\"585\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qPB6iPXhkdI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Like I said, there\u2019s some great music coming out of New Zealand lately. But last week\u2019s The Beths don\u2019t have much in common with this week\u2019s Aldous Harding. To the same degree the former are loud and upbeat, the latter is restrained and maxes out at what I\u2019d call barely midtempo. Where the former present themselves as a completely traditional rock act, the latter brings a striking, heavily choreographed, frequently discomforting visual element to her music. The former pen lyrics that are lucid and droll; the latter skews impressionistic (the chorus of her most notable song to date includes the line \u201cLooks like a date is set \/ Show the ferret to the egg\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Born Hannah Sian Topp, Harding comes from a folk background, and her albums haven\u2019t diverged much from that direction. And yet, the more you sit with what at first seem to be pleasant acoustic ballads, the more odd details begin to stand out. There are those lyrics, filled with vivid imagery but hard to pin down. Then there\u2019s Harding\u2019s voice itself, which can sound fascinatingly different from song to song \u2013 compare the sweet, higher voice in \u201cFixture Picture\u201d with the strangely clipped, deeper voice used on \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xE-A0cNSLmc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Imagining My Man<\/a>,\u201d a highlight from her previous LP. Hers is a complex instrument, and I\u2019m not sure I can think of another current singer who exhibits the same kind of textural range, or the same confidence in exploring it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then there\u2019s the whole visual aspect. I was surprised when I first watched the video for \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QyZeJr5ppm8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Barrel<\/a>\u201d (the song with the ferret chorus), which consists of Harding dancing like a broken animatronic while wearing some kind of puritanical nightmare dress, and a hat that I\u2019m not even going to try to describe. At one point the hat covers her entire head, and then there\u2019s some kind of warped Kabuki mask, and it\u2019s all pretty upsetting and captivating and not at all what I\u2019d thought the video for this pleasant acoustic ballad was going to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cFixture Picture\u201d comes from the same LP, 2019\u2019s <em>Designer.<\/em> Like \u201cThe Barrel,\u201d it\u2019s meditative and acoustic, but with a more subtly psychedelic melody and soaring chord progression. Harding\u2019s unique visual style drives this video as well \u2013 the first verse and chorus are one slow zoom as she strums a guitar among the mountains, face once again concealed by an oversized hat (this time the outfit has more of a Michael Palin\/Spanish Inquisition vibe), and then she proceeds to awkwardly harass her bandmates with a tambourine. It\u2019s good stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Harding clearly already has a strong, defined artistic sensibility, and I think she\u2019ll be as exciting to watch evolve over the next decade as The Beths, in a completely different way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like I said, there\u2019s some great music coming out of New Zealand lately. But last week\u2019s The Beths don\u2019t have much in common with this week\u2019s Aldous Harding. To the same degree the former are loud and upbeat, the latter is restrained and maxes out at what I\u2019d call barely midtempo. Where the former present&hellip; <\/p>\n<div class=\"readmore-wrapper\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.richbradley.org\/songs\/201x-favorites\/fixture-picture\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-201x-favorites","tag-aldous-harding"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Fixture Picture - Aldous Harding | Rich Bradley<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I\u2019m not sure I can think of another current singer who exhibits the same textural range as Aldous Harding, or the same confidence in exploring it.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.richbradley.org\/songs\/201x-favorites\/fixture-picture\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fixture Picture - 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