Saturday, June 10, 2017

Song of the day

"Party", by Aldous Harding.

As of today, this is the most breathtaking song I have heard. I shouldn't say "ever". Possibly ever. The clip below shows her performing it live in the studio for NZ television. It misses the multitracked vocals of the album version, which are what really push the song (and the listener) over the edge. But it still captures something that, by rights, should be impossible to capture.

And I know that too much water has flowed under too many bridges for me to still be looking for traces of the beloved Dunedin sound in records coming from New Zealand, but maybe, just maybe, if you close your eyes and listen really, really hard to the album version (which I would urge you to do), there is something here, even if it is only in the piano towards the end of the song, that might remind you of Peter Jefferies.