Monolith Cocktail Blog

Album Review::Gianluigi Marsibilio 

Aldous Harding ‘Designer’
(4AD) 27^th April 2019

Escaping any form of classification with a measured and completely tailored style on the vibrations of your soul, “Designer” is the perfect creature of Aldous Harding.

In ancient Greece the poets who dealt with epics, took the stories of the incredible heroes and mixed their tangible existence with legend and fantasy. Aldous Harding has shaped a record that describes, tells and immerses us in an epic of pain, a bittersweet story of a unique artistic life. The singer-songwriter’s faith and hopes cannot be strengthened even in paradise. In three verses: “Breathe in and out/ Kissing The Doubt/ And Whisper softly” she hides the essence of a veil of Maya, still unbroken and that will remain there to make us contort by doubts. A narrated, sung and lived track in which the coordinates of being are lost.

Designer feeds on doubts and acts of faith, moments of contemplation and intellectual depth.

Everything goes hand in hand with a series of atmospheres that are cured and varied, with the incredible touch of John Parish, songs like ‘Treasure’ or ‘Weight of the Planets’ use a register that draws a way of writing songs that I would call “oneiric pop”.

Interestingly the record features the minimalist pinches of guitar and the simplest of Stornelli, both of which intersect in a definition of aesthetic research precision.





Women in music don’t need any #MeToo, the most beautiful and profound message of truth is given by powerful records like this or by the work of Weyes Blood, Stella Donnelly and Phoebe Bridgers.

Designer is a record that speaks and tells the creation on the one hand less mythological, less biblical. Aldous Harding is a wandering goddess who makes mistakes, collapses and precisely for this reason takes on dreamlike connotations, enriched by a deep humanity.

This record interacts in the closest way to a contemporary definition of creativity, in fact the explosion of sounds, ideas and atmospheres does not start from a pure idealization of a thought but rather from a profitable interaction with Parish, who with loads of loop stations, etheric sounds and dreamy voice, has drawn an imaginary, much more precise than in the past, on an artist who felt the need.

Despite the fact that the female author’s panorama is full of projects rich in contemporary and interesting sounds, a Gothic and slightly blacker chaos was missing. Designer is a record that corresponds to the description, philosophical, of formativity (“formativity”) that indicates “a doing that, while doing, invents the way of doing” (Un fare che mentre fa, inventa il modo di fare).

Everything is full of a creativity that rhymes with intimacy; Designer is a feminine universe that narrates a new genesis, a beginning.