- There are a few things about Aldous Harding which are deceptive. It can seem like she actually encourages her listening public to entertain a range of misconceptions about who exactly she is. In many press shots and videos she stares at the viewer, deadpan, while it seems like the real Aldous slithers away from the light of scrutiny, smiling coyly as she retreats into the shadows.

Her name isn't Aldous for starters. You know she had a showbiz mum because few people are born with monikers as readily marketable for a career in singing and songwriting as Hannah Harding, but, with the compelling argument “it sounds like a manly version of Alice”, she's slowly bringing everyone round to the new name. It should be a bit easier in Australia where Harding is still, largely, an unknown quantity. Even though Harding's something of a hometown hero back in the burg of Lyttleton, and -based on the strength of her debut, self-titled full-length- up and down the land of the land of the long white cloud, it's only now that that same record is getting a local release through Spunk.

On its cover you'll see Harding's unkempt tresses messily stuffed into a trucker's cap, an instant signifier for sweaty, bourbon-fueled country music. It's a slightly more significant bit of misdirection, because, as the ghostly choir intones the opening of the album's lead cut, Stop Your Tears, we're a long way from country. As the choir fades out, Harding takes over with just an acoustic guitar and her highly distinctive voice. Fey and lovelorn stories are molded into a sparse, melancholy and plaintive sound, which Harding has self-consciously labelled 'gothic folk'. A large part of what gets you there is, still more deception; this time it's Harding's voice: as far as I've been able to find out, Harding is a Kiwi born and bred, yet she sounds anything but, adopting a very mannered quaver and twang that falls somewhere between the elfin stylings of Joanna Newsom and the Icelandic accent of the likes of Ólöf Arnalds. It's an extremely effective vehicle for Harding's other-worldly tales.

As it turns out, perhaps the trucker's cap isn't quite as deceptive as you might think, when you hear the lush fiddling on single, Hunter, or the rich harmonies of a song like Merriweather, you'll realise Harding is tapping a rich vein of southern gothic akin to the darkness of The Handsome Family and as oldschool as Loretta Lynn and it contributes a deliciously fulsome quality to the music.

The shadowy and deceptive elements of gothic melodrama are much of what makes it so unhealthily fascinating. You can hear it on that track, Hunter: an ostensibly bittersweet love ballad, betrayed by only the barest hint of bloody murder. Such dissembling qualities litter this album and fracture the identity of Aldous Harding herself and are a large part of what makes both her and the record, utterly intriguing.

- Chris Cobcroft.