Aldous HardingVicar Street, Dublin★★★★☆Aldous Harding is one of those performers who feel as if they’ve arrived on Earth by accident and are still working out the rules of human interaction. The New Zealand indie star materialises at Vicar Street on Friday wearing a puzzled expression, as if she’d popped out for a coffee and somehow ended up standing in front of an adoring audience. When she dances she grooves like a confused stick insect trapped in amber.If her bodypopping is eccentric, her music is eerier still. She and her nimble band open with the unsettling title track from her recent fifth album, Train on the Island, a stripped-back bluesy meander where hallucinatory wordplay is amped up by her eerie delivery. “Mommy said my inception was like eating a pearl,” she croons in a velvety voice set at a flat, emotionless pitch. “I blew all glass out the home.”Such obtuse lyrics mark Harding as one of the few contemporary musicians actively trying to push their crowd out of its comfort zone. She wants to make the listener feel something. If that something is a sense of rising dread, well, at least they’re not bored and gazing at their phone.She continues to sway from side to side as the tune chugs mysteriously by before taking a seat for I Ate the Most, a Radiohead-style ballad full of nightmarish imagery. What’s it about? That’s up to the listener to decide. Again, there is little outward emotion in Harding’s voice – she often sounds beautifully bored – yet the track hints at dark subjects such as childhood trauma and eating disorders.As an audience, we’ve been trained to expect artists to tell us how to feel – for the performance to reflect the emotions articulated by the lyrics. But there are no signposts in Harding’s work. In a world where we all know far too much about everything, that ambivalence has a powerful, if not transgressive, quality.She is careful not to stay in the same groove too long, however, switching into a more approachable register for the quietly rollicking Venus in the Zinnia, a duet with her real-life partner, H Hawkline. Their voices and guitars mesh wonderfully as the hurly-burly country rock fights through the dissonance: it’s like Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers singing Islands in the Stream while a David Lynch film plays in the background.There are flashes of dark wit throughout the 90-minute show. Harding waves in dry amusement at individual fans, both on the ground floor and up in the balcony. Then, during the encore, she advises the crowd, “If you have any drugs, take them now.”[ Aldous Harding: Train on the Island review – Hypnotic, wonderfully bizarre goth popOpens in new window ]She says this with a smile, as if amused to discover a playful streak she didn’t know she possessed. This is by way of introducing Imagining My Man, a rural gothic stomper that reflects on the divide between romantic infatuation and the slog of a long-term relationship.These are universal topics, but Harding makes them weird and hallucinatory. It’s her gift in a nutshell: to sing about the lives we all live but make the experience feel like a scary story spun around the campfire – or from a psychiatrist’s couch.