Wow that's a great cover!

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if there's a want for something new, you might find me at the start, or where it ends for you.

http://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/201 ... -the-ages/

The World We Live In” — P.J. Harvey Creates an Album for the Ages

Written by: Stuart Mitchner

“Undaunted, never-failing love for you, England, is all, to which I cling.” —from P.J. Harvey’s song “England”

PJ Harvey, "Let England Shake"

The new year belongs to England, or so it seems after a week listening to and living in P.J. Harvey’s Let England Shake (Vagrant 2011) and watching a DVD of the first season of BBC’s savage, shamelessly gripping detective series Luther. As if those two brilliant broadsides weren’t enough, 2012 is also the Charles Dickens bicentenary. Since the “man who invented Christmas” also had a lot to do with the invention of England, the coming year presents an opportunity to explore one’s inner anglophile and/or anglophobe. If you’ve ever lived for an extended period in the place Nathaniel Hawthorne called “Our Old Home,” you’ve probably known both extremes.

Winner of the Mercury Prize as the best album of 2011 and the Guardian’s choice for Album of the Year, Polly Jean Harvey’s latest record should not be approached as either an indictment of her homeland or an anti-war polemic. Let England Shake is a work of art for the ages. At the moment I can’t remember the last time an album this side of Mozart or Charlie Parker has encouraged me to think in those terms. Well aware of the kneejerk reaction of certain benighted critics (the only one so far is Robert Christgau, who calls it, incredibly, “a suite of well-turned if unnecessarily understated antiwar songs”), Harvey has made it clear in various interviews how careful she was not to let the album become preachy or overtly political. While she’s admitted that her intentions could be called “political,” she uses the term only in the broadest sense, as in “how people relate to one another.”

Harvey’s lyrics can be as unsparing as the dark twists and turns of the action in Luther: England’s “weighted down with silent dead,” its “dancing days are done,” and “by the shores/heavy stones are falling.” In “The Last Living Rose,” Harvey sings:

Let me walk through the stinking alleys

To the music of drunken beatings

Past the Thames river glistening

Like gold hastily sold

For nothing … nothing

In “This Glorious Land,” the answer to her question, “What is the fruit of our glorious land?” is “deformed children” and “orphaned children.”

Charles Dickens might not be quite so harsh, but he would know where she’s coming from, having created characters like Fagin and Bill Sikes and, in Bleak House, a man so freighted with the stuff of sin that he simply exploded, leaving a toxic miasma in his wake. In Neil Cross’s fascinating Luther, mentally deformed Londoners kidnap, torture, and murder women and children and occasionally men, and England’s favorite couple, Alice and Luther, a pretty psychopath and a troubled black genius chief of detectives, take their romance to another level, discussing Paradise Lost in a church while a statue of Milton listens in.

And now we have the return of Downton Abbey, English life upstairs and downstairs during the Great War, featuring another star-crossed couple, Matthew and Mary. In Let England Shake, P.J. Harvey sings of war and death and pain with a ferocity that puts the token battle scenes in Downton Abbey to shame. While the merging themes and movements coming together in the concluding episode of Luther will have your heart in your throat, Harvey’s “All and Everyone” is a far more sophisticated and accomplished piece of emotional enchantment, driven, even diabolic, in its relentless pattern of pressure and release, crescendo and diminuendo, pounding out its message of death “everywhere, in the air.” Death isn’t confined to the battlefield, it’s as the title says “all and everyone.” The way the song is paced, moving in grim, stirring surges, creates an intensity that is both harrowing and beautiful. But then every song in this album is rich with beauty, no matter how grim the lyric or how dirge-like the sax/trombone/drumbeat of doom created by Harvey, who plays saxophone as well as autoharp, and is accompanied by John Parish, Mick Harvey (no relation), and John Marc Butty.

“The Dark Places,” another devastating lament (“So our young men hid/with guns, in the dirt/and in the dark places”), is as raw and pure as a cry of anguish. There’s nothing of mere message in Let England Shake. Like the title, the music simply moves in on you, grabs you, holds you, and, yes, shakes you.

“The world we live in” was Harvey’s answer when she was asked by an interviewer what inspired the album. These 12 songs ultimately celebrate life, music, nature, love, poetry, and the creative spirit. At the same time, considering that war and waste, greed and madness, sickness and death, are all worthy, challenging subjects for an artist with Harvey’s gifts, she embraces them, takes them on, makes a mission of them. When the album came out last February, she told an interviewer on Radio 4 that she’d started wondering “where the officially appointed war songwriter was. You’ve got your war artists, like Steve McQueen, and your war photographers. I fantasized that I had been appointed this official songwriter.” When her thoughts were brought to the attention of Roger Tolson at the Imperial War Museum, he was ready to explore the possibility that Harvey might actually visit the war zone in Afghanistan, submitting her name to the museum’s committee for discussion.

Clearly Harvey had a great deal more than England, the Great War, and the Gallipoli debacle on her mind during the two years she was gathering material for this album. She told New Musical Express that what most interested her were the “cycles of conflict across many eras” from World War I “right up to Iraq and Afghanistan” and “long after we’ve come and gone.” Part of her lengthy preparation involved reading blogs from Afghani women and Iraqis, “to hear what people are actually saying now.” Another key influence was Darkness Visible: Afghanistan, a photography exhibit by Seamus Murphy, whose videos accompany each of the album’s 12 songs. Since the lyrics are not always completely audible, Murphy begins most of his videos with someone speaking words from the song (my favorite is the auto mechanic reciting “Bitter Branches” as he works on an engine).

Harvey’s England

Harvey considers her conflicted view of England, “the push and pull you feel with your native land,” as a universal reality, something she hopes people from other countries will understand and sympathize with when they hear Let England Shake. In the title track, which is sung over the xylophone riff from the old pop novelty song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” a play on the Gallipoli theme, Harvey creates a realm of sound that rises like a rainbow over a lyric “weighted down with the silent dead.” The words and music run free, turning heavy death into a fountain to “splash about, swim back and forth, and laugh out loud” in.

From the first song on, Harvey gives herself up to the “cruel nature” of her theme, which the wind says “has won again” in “On Battleship Hill.” The first time you hear “England,” where she sings beyond singing in a transport of pure sound, it’s hard to listen to, a dissonant wailing that blends stridently with a sample of “Kassem Miro” by Said el Kurdi. As the song progresses, she seems to be letting it have its way with her, as if the song were singing her. The effect is searing, like the sound of an embattled spirit crying to be heard.

Other Englands

“England” is as scary a love song as you’ll ever hear, but a love song is what it profoundly is, “Undaunted, never failing love for you, England, is all, to which I cling.” Compared to Harvey’s England, Kate Bush’s love song for her homeland in “Lionheart” is an idyll. When Bush sings the line “You read me Shakespeare on the rolling Thames — That old river poet that never, ever ends,” she wants love of England to make your heart ache, not to pierce it. While Polly’s war and death England tears her up, Kate dives into her lyrical war (“Dropped from my black Spitfire to my funeral barge”) where “the air raid shelters are blooming clover,” and, typically, kiss-me Kate sings, “Give me one kiss in apple-blossom./Give me one wish, and I’d be wassailing/In the orchard, my English rose.”

The “drunken beatings” in P.J. Harvey’s “Last Living Rose” that suggest the land of Luther, take a gentler turn (“the sky move, the ocean shimmer, the hedge shake”) at the end. But the music recalls a line from an older song, Sinéad O’Connor’s “England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses/It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.”

Then there’s Ray Davies’s England in Arthur, Or the Decline and Fall of The British Empire, but that’s something for another column, in the year of Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday.

If Ray is the UK’s rock and roll poet laureate, P.J. Harvey in Let England Shake performs in that realm where issues of custom, culture, time and place give way to the power of art. I can imagine her singing for England’s poets and writers, composers and painters, Turner and Whistler, Dickens and Wilde, Britten and Elgar, Rupert Brooke and Kipling, Chaplin and Shaw, among many others, dating back to Blake and Milton, shadowy figures in the balcony of the church in Harvey’s Dorset hometown of Bridport, where the album was recorded, watching the woman holding the autoharp to her chest and singing “I live and die through England.”

It's not a review, but I don't know where to post it...
PJ appears in "The music year's biggest events as scrobbled by Last.fm listeners"

http://www.last.fm/bestof/2011/yearinmusic

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Tumblr - OK Amanda
Beckett - My band's soundcloud

From Persephone Magazine:

As-Yet-Unnamed Music Column: PJ Harvey

January 26, 2012 in Music

Hi, campers! I apologise for my absence last week. I was throwing up. It wasn’t pretty. The less said about that, the better. On to the music!

When I first heard of Let England Shake by PJ Harvey, the things I knew about Polly Jean I could count on one hand. She was English; she had been a sort of punky riot grrl type figure back in the early ’90s, when I was way too little to be paying attention; she had once done a tour entitled “Lick My Legs.” She won the Mercury Prize for best English album on Sept 11, 2001, which she was unable to accept due to the disruption caused by the tragedy in New York; and won again in 2011, the only person ever to collect it twice. She collected it, by the way, looking like this:



That photo doesn’t do her hat justice. It looks sort of like she plucked a seagull and then wired up a crown out of its feathers and some bread ties. But I digress.

Let England Shake is Harvey’s latest brainchild, and its Mercury scoop, combined with the lure of a name breaking out of my childhood into “real life,” made it my next big listen. I first played it on a car stereo driving through rain on the way to the Lake District, which, as far as I can tell, is essentially the perfect setting for this moody, haunting love letter to England and a memorial for her dead.

The album is at once unabashedly political and unsettlingly vague. Many of the songs reference wars, but those wars blend into each other: lyrics about trench warfare mingle with lines about dinars and belly dancers. Interspersed with scenes of carnage — one song mentions arms and legs in the trees, “a colonel whose nerves were shot” — are gorgeous, melodic valentines to Harvey’s home: on “The Last Living Rose,” possibly my favorite track, she sings “Take me back to beautiful England, and the grave and filthy mess of ages and battered books and fog rolling down behind the mountains…”

Harvey conjures ghostly regiments of young men, long perished in places far away, and links them with a sadness far beyond their deaths in battle. “I fear our blood won’t rise again… England’s dancing days are done,” she laments on the title track. It’s not just these young soldiers who have gone; it’s the hope of future generations, and the idea that England, through her wars, has lost something irreplaceable.

I was struck, looking at the liner notes, to realize that most of the lyrics contain no rhymes. You don’t notice when you’re listening, but the songs are essentially prose poems set to music. The short films made by Seamus Murphy to accompany the album play on this, as they often feature ordinary people reciting the lyrics aloud before the songs begin. Take a look at “On Battleship Hill”:

[Clip]

Her voice is incredible, but it’s the trembling strings and solemn male vocals in the background that really sell the graveyard atmosphere. When I first saw this video, with its accompanying portraits of servicemen long gone and the faces of children, I wept. Other songs are equally evocative through clever instrumentation: the bugle reveille that opens “The Glorious Land,” for instance, or the wake singalong feel of the closing track, “The Colour Of The Earth,” a cry for a fallen friend. Autoharp, xylophone, angry electric guitar: all contribute to a soundscape that evokes dark hills at twilight, cold tea, the smell of English fields. The rows of gravestones in Normandy, the empty chair by the fire.

First, listen to the album. Then watch the short films on YouTube; they’re all there, on the “letenglandshake” channel. There’s a reason this album took Best of the Year in sixteen publications. You come out sobered; but you feel wiser, older, more grounded. It’s the most beautiful album about death I’ve ever heard.

Until next week, ladies! Keep listening. And if any of you have suggestions for titles for the column, send ‘em in!

http://persephonemagazine.com/2012/01/a ... pj-harvey/

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Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

From Vividscribe.com:

MUSIC REVIEW: Let England Shake, by PJ Harvey

January 25, 2012Music, Reviews

Being a PJ Harvey album, any assessment from this humble reviewer is always going to have a “Holy Crap! That’s Awesome!” element in it somewhere. The woman hits even when she misses. That said, a PJ Harvey miss an extraordinarily rare occurrence and more a matter of listener taste than any fault of hers. Let England Shake hits and does so with the extraordinary artistry and delicate force, almost violence that PJ Harvey has cultivated as her very own type of perfection.

Let England Shake is an anthem to her country, more specifically an anthem to her country at war. It’s an ambiguous title that meshes well with the complexity of its lyrics and its subject. Let England Shake. Is that a tremble? Under the drums and boots of war? Is it a shake of might? A shake of terror? All of the above?

The title track kicks of the album, comes rolling in with Harvey’s high range vocal sweeps through, teasing out this plinky, almost poppy track that is backed with an sense of almost restrained rock, the contrasting darkness of the subject – a country “weighted down with silent dead.” In Track 2, ‘The Last Living Rose’, gritty cities, stinking alleys, graveyards and dead sea captains mix with the rolling fogs, the golden Thames – “take me back to beautiful England”, a lament that seems both ironic and literal as the gruesome and the beautiful combine, amidst the slow labouring of muted guitars.

‘The Glorious Land’ is for my money the finest moment on the album.

[Clip]

Opening with a rhythmic fullness as a deep and dirty bass rolls around with a bugle. PJ launches into a dynamic call and response type of refrain on top of it, the bugle’s call to arms sounding all the way through as she asks “How is our glorious country ploughed? Not by iron ploughs. Our lands is ploughed by tanks and feet, Feet. Marching.” The core of Let England Shake and its comments on war is in this song. We hear: “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” and a response in a disturbing sing song chorus of kids, “Its fruit is deformed children….Its fruit is orphaned children.” Again, we never get to break into full rock mode, feeling held back as these big sounds roll right on over us. For many listens, the bugle call bothered me. It disrupts the perfect wave of the rhythm guitar, it jars and dislocates, it’s a barrier jammed into the music. I haven’t read any comment from Harvey on this song so I can only speculate, but it seems that’s exactly what it’s meant to be.

Let England Shake continues as a whole in this rhythmic low gear yet high impact rock, lyrically almost sounding like a love hate lament to not just her nation but the world at large. We never get into the ethereal sparseness that was White Chalk (2007), we never push into the highly polished accessible rock of Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000) but we wander between them both. I continue to marvel at the application of Harvey’s vocal ranges, how she can sing with such girlish innocence, and then with deep, brooding melancholy, with anger, with brutal hysterics and ghostly calm. Listen to the jarring ‘England’ and it’s all there in the one track, and then straight back into the solid, accessible rock one might think of as the PJ Harvey of old in the following ‘Bitter Branches.’

The album closes with a traditional folk ballad in ‘The Colour of the Earth.’ Here, long time Harvey collaborator John Parish takes lead vocals to tell a tale of The Battle of the Nek. Nek was a disastrous WWI engagement fought as part of the Gallipoli campaign. Some 400 Australian troops, the Australian 3rd Lighthorse, were killed in the futile attack, and no British soldiers. It’s an interesting choice of topic for the album, perhaps a comment on the arm of the Commonwealth, that England’s bloody history, England’s shake if you will, is not only confined to the tiny green island in the North.

Let England Shake is an album that can be thoroughly enjoyed on an audio level alone, but I think any listener will be hard pressed not to feel the lyrics and themes creep into them like a possession. I’m not convinced this is simply an anti-war album, but perhaps more of an observation of history. Yes, war is a brutal bloody, unnecessary thing, but our nations are inexorably shaped in it and by it.

The Harvey entourage has been at it for a good long while, getting better and better with every year. With every new album I’m convinced I’m hearing PJ Harvey perfected, and again with this one. Let England Shake has PJ Harvey once again pulling out at a new top level in an entirely new game, one entirely of her own devising.

Kate Krake

http://www.vividscribe.com/music-review ... pj-harvey/

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Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

Let England Shake was released February of last year, correct? I find it awesome that it's still getting reviewed almost a year later. (or is that the norm for most albums these days?)

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"He intentado ahogar mis penas, pero el hijo de puta aprendió a nadar."

Faceplace • El Jay

gwarlingo’s pick of the week: pj harvey’s “let england shake”

On my recent visit to the UK I talked to several music lovers about the British music scene. One classical pianist I met in London recommended the choral work of British composer Jonathan Harvey and urged me to investigate the excellent website Sound and Music, which covers the contemporary music and sound art scene in the UK.

At the other end of the musical spectrum, the young guitarist Kiran Marvin Pearce kindly gave me a rundown of some of his favorite British indie bands. The Bombay Bicycle Club, Mark Ronson, The Coral, Noah and the Whale, and The Black Ghosts stood out during our musical tour.

I also stumbled across the new band Yuck, a young, London-based garage band whose self-titled debut album is worth a listen. Although the band members were still in diapers during the 90s indie rock explosion, their passion for the music of this era is infectious and owes something to bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.

Despite these great, new musical discoveries, in the end my takeaway album from the UK trip was not by some obscure indie band as I had anticipated, but instead, was the eighth studio album by musical veteran PJ Harvey.

In this age of listening to music on the go and on perpetual “shuffle,” it is uncommon that I come across a record that compels me to stop and pay close attention. But Polly Jean Harvey’s Let England Shake is one of those rare musical gems that has everything going for it–original sounds and textures, poignant lyrics, an overarching theme of war and violence that is never too didactic or heavy-handed, thoughtful pacing, and creative vocalization that utilizes Harvey’s upper range.

Every track on this record stands alone as a solid, inventive work in its own right, but each song also contributes to the project as a whole. There is no musical filler here. The album gets better and better with each listen and deserves to be heard in sequence in its entirety as Harvey intended. It is a very English record, drawing on Harvey’s West Country background, English vernacular songs, and the country’s military history. The Thames and the White Cliffs of Dover both make appearances.

Let England Shake proves that Harvey is capable of reinventing herself and pushing her creative talents to their limits. Not only is it PJ Harvey’s strongest work to date, but it is one of the best albums of the year so far. Its brilliance lies partially in its contradictions. The record opens with the line, “The West’s asleep. Let England shake, weighted down with silent dead. I fear our blood won’t rise again. England’s dancing days are done.” Harvey sets these somber lyrics about war and violence to lively, upbeat melodies that draw inspiration from traditional folk tunes. Her thoughtful, restrained lyrics are punctuated by jaunty autoharp, brass instruments, electric piano, and off-beat samples.

“The Glorious Land” is one of the album’s highlights and is a fine example of the way Harvey is able to create a truly original sound by blending her lilting voice with feverish guitar, drums, and an out-of-time, out-of-tune military bugle sample.

In “The Words That Maketh Murder” Harvey sings from the point of view of a soldier who has witnessed horrible atrocities: “I’ve seen and done things I want to forget; I’ve seen a corporal whose nerves were shot climbing behind the fierce, gone sun, I’ve seen flies swarming everyone….” At the end of the song, Harvey brilliantly turns a line from Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” into a jaunty refrain: ”What if I take my problems to the United Nations?” This is dark comedy at its best.

Although Harvey explores the themes of violence and war, Let England Shake isn’t a protest or message record. Harvey’s lyrics remain skillfully restrained and ambiguous throughout and give the album a timeless quality. She is never overtly political or preachy, but assumes the role of an observant narrator instead. While Harvey references specific battles and wars, she always leaves some space in her lyrics. She could be speaking of the Great War, Afghanistan, or Iraq. The specifics are blurred, and the end result is compelling, atmospheric, and mysterious.

Harvey recently explained her creative approach to the BBC’s Andrew Marr. I’m “always trying to come from the human point of view,” Harvey said, “because I don’t feel qualified to sing from a political standpoint I sing as a human being affected by the politics, and that for me is a more successful way because I so often feel that with a lot of protest music, I’m being preached to, and I dont want that.”

Let England Shake was recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset on a cliff-top overlooking the sea. Flood, John Parish, and Mick Harvey all make their own musical contributions to the record. Harvey spent over two years writing the lyrics for the album, and her commitment to the project, as well as her own creative evolution shows.

As Harvey explained to Dorian Lynskey in an interview in the Guardian, she sits down to write every single day. “You have to be more disciplined, and you ultimately end up with a much stronger piece of work…If it takes 10 years then I would rather wait and know that I felt each piece was strong than feel that it was time to put something out but five pieces are a bit weak.”

“I wanted to get better,” she told Lynskey. “I wanted to be more coherent, I wanted there to be a greater strength and depth emotionally, and all these things require work – to hone something, to get rid of any superfluous language. I’m inspired by the other great writers I go back to and read again and again, and think how did they do that?”

In the Lynskey interview, Harvey expressed her admiration for writers like T.S. Eliot, Yeats, John Burnside, James Joyce, and Ted Hughes. Harold Pinter’s poems “American Football” or “The Disappeared” were singled out as particular favorites.” All of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people…I think as a creative artist it’s crucial to be open – to feel. You can’t do it with a closed heart. You almost have to hand over your soul to that action. And so there can be times when you can feel too full of the piece that you’re making. It’s almost like being a sponge and you just have to absorb everything in order to have all of the goods to make something out of that.”

The daughter of a stonemason and sculptor, Harvey was brought up on a farm in Corscombe, England. She applied to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, but her debut single “Dress,” garnered so much attention and acclaim that Harvey decided to pursue music instead. She still sculpts, draws, and paints, however, and the visual arts remain a potent influence on her. ”I’m probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets,” she told the Guardian. “With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It’s almost like watching a scene from a film, and that’s what I go about trying to catch in a song.”

Given Harvey’s interest in the visual arts, it is fitting that she chose to work with war photographer Seamus Murphy for this project. The end result of their collaboration is twelve short films, which combine each of the album’s musical tracks with footage that Murphy shot around England. Murphy’s work is a compelling visual companion to Harvey’s music. Each film is a visual poem capturing some element of English life. In several of the films, Harvey’s lyrics are recited as poetry by various English people–a car mechanic, a young girl, an old man sitting in his living room. Not since the filmmaker Jem Cohen’s work with REM, Fugazi, and Vic Chesnutt have I seen such a successful collaboration between a musician and photographer.

Murphy’s films add a new layer of meaning to Harvey’s songs–they expand her music, instead of confining it. Murphy’s photography is a worthy companion, for the overall affect of Let England Shake is one of moving images–graveyards, battlefields, rivers, fog, damp earth, oceans, and twisted roots–evocative everyday scenes that resonate with a country’s collective memory.

This is a poetic and pastoral record, and in many ways, it belongs in the tradition of British literature and painting more than music. Listening to Let England Shake, I’m reminded of the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” of blurred cemeteries, farms, and churches glimpsed through a train window, of the haunting World War I paintings by the brothers John and Paul Nash. As we inhabit and explore the world of Let England Shake, we catch sight of these images, and then they’re gone. But Harvey’s imagery has a cumulative effect. While the album is filled with snapshots of war, both past and present, Let England Shake is largely a work about place and people–a poignant love letter to England and its troubled, violent history.

Listen to Let England Shake (and help support Gwarlingo in the process!) by purchasing a copy at iTunes or Amazon.

These are four of my favorite short films Seamus Murphy made with PJ Harvey. (To see all twelve films go to PJ Harvey’s website.

http://www.gwarlingo.com/2011/gwarlingo ... and-shake/

_________________
Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

http://1yron.tumblr.com/post/1761498354 ... land-shake

ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 14TH 2011
1YRON’S TOP 52 RECORDS OF 2011 RANKING: #1


The impact of Let England Shake on PJ Harvey’s career cannot be underestimated. At a time when the listenership of the Yeovil-born singer songwriter seemed to be gradually shrinking, it was unthinkable that something like a war record could catapult her artist back into the limelight to a position of unparalleled respect and honour. The sublime White Chalk, this record’s predecessor, was released three and a half years prior to a nation of music lovers seemingly dissatisfied with Polly’s recent career trajectory (Uh-Huh Her hardly ranks amongst her masterpieces). Its calcified themes of bleak, hill-top isolation and Miss Havisham-esque misery made for some disturbing, often uneasy listening. White Chalk is emotional starvation and by no means the kind of record to expand one’s audience with. Yet make no mistake, these aren’t the concerns of the artist and she has never made music to appease anyone. If anything, taking Let England Shake into perspective, her output has actually improved in quality over time. Dry and Rid Of Me showcased a remarkably unique talent, but it’s the diversity of Harvey’s persona, shifting with each release to incorporate the strength of her previous records with something different each time that has kept her relevant whilst many of her contemporaries have waxed and waned.

Harvey has constantly expressed a need to never repeat herself, and Let England Shake is a grand departure from anything that preceded it. It’s remarkable when someone like Harvey (who has never actually released a bad record in the twenty years that she’s been making them) produces what is now considered by many to be her best. Musically, it’s built upon a rich instrumental palette thanks to her adoption of the autoharp, allowing her the chance to convey a wide breadth of sound and filling these songs with a tragic, poetic beauty. The sparse transparency of White Chalk’s piano-based vulnerability is taken as a foundation for Shake, building upon those glass-shattering vocal cries and that paranoid mindset to a point where Harvey is continually looking outward. What has come to be the main focal point of discussion around Shake since its release is its powerful subject matter, and Harvey’s response to the socio-political conditions of the world we live in today offset in her a deep-rooted exploration of her own nation’s tumultuous history. Citing the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Pinter as initial influences, Harvey began to delve further by reading war letters, as well as more oblique references such as the art of Dalí and Goya (it’s hard to imagine the latter’s Disasters Of War series having not crossed her path at least once). Military conflicts such as the Gallipoli Campaign and Constantinople also take root, forming the basis of Harvey’s fixed vantage point.

The First World War is Harvey’s calling card for reference points, and this could be down to the way in which conscription was depicted as glamorous and incredibly patriotic. The First World War, such was its position in the progression of industrial technologies, also ensured men fought face to face instead of inside tanks, from the sea, or air, for example. Where the record really excels is in Harvey’s ability to offset the heavy lyrical imagery with the jaunty, often marching nature of the music. On The Glorious Land, bugle calls puncture an established procession of guitars as Harvey questions the foundation of her nation’s ancestry. The world view of England is often one of peaceful tranquility, of apple orchards and exquisite dinner parties and formal evening wear, and yet it is also a powerful nation with a history of bloodshed, merciless battles and gruesome victories. So when Harvey sings, “What is the glorious fruit of our land? The fruit is deformed children,” it’s paired with a mutual reverence and disgust for an island that has fought so many wars on so many different fronts (often simultaneously) yet at an unspeakable cost to human life.

Whether referring to the white chalk hills that will likely rot her bones or constructing bleak portraits through Angelene, Catherine, Elise or Leah, Harvey has frequently used her nationality to ground her music in a decidedly English tradition. Throughout Shake, this passion is greatly intensified; on The Last Living Rose, she berates ‘goddamn Europeans’ through a homesick love cry for ‘beautiful England’ before wandering down stinking alleys past the glistening Thames path. Elsewhere, on the skeletal England, Harvey lives and dies through the country she adores in what is essentially a love poem to the land that has shaped the woman she is today. A dramatic sense of urgency in Harvey’s words is nothing new; she has always been a provocateur, seeking to unnerve and stimulate in equal measure. The material of her early career was more suggestive and much aligned to the brooding sexuality of a young woman on tracks like Dress or Rub ‘Til It Bleeds. Twenty years later, Harvey is more concerned with how the brutality of war and human suffering can impact in similarly unnerving ways. It says a lot about not only the shifting world we live in but what Harvey deems significant and relevant to be discussing. On The Words That Maketh Murder, she sings from a perspective that feels a little too close for comfort. Lines like “Soldiers fell like lumps of meat” and “Flesh quivering in the heat” are as raw as open wounds yet her vocal delivery is one of shellshocked immobility. There’s nothing she can do, nothing anyone can do, nothing even the United Nations can do, and it’s a point she drives through repeatedly. On All And Everyone she sings about the futility of death from Bolton’s Ridge, an eyewitness account of the horror and tragedy of the beach front attack on the Gallipoli penninsula in 1915. Through rising autoharp, a chilling guitar riff and on to a lagging horn section intended to convey the disorientation of battle, Harvey’s lyrical imagery is bolstered by her perfect control of her choice instruments and lines such as “Death was everywhere” and “A bank of red earth,” subverting the perverse image of thousands of dead bodies “lying out there in the open air” into something deeply poetic.

The most effective use of the autoharp comes with the track On Battleship Hill with its daybreak introduction before settling into something much more sombre. Harvey deliberately sets her vocal in an upper register, twisting her tongue around astonishing lines such as “Jagged mountains jutting out, cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth.” She’s joined by John Parish and Mick Harvey at various points throughout the album and their vocal contributions add further realism to her storytelling. Perhaps it’s lazy to suggest that Parish and Harvey sing from the perspective of fallen soldiers or injured servicemen simply because they are men, but such imagery feels entirely appropriate given the balance between Polly’s position as a female protagonist. The words they sing always mimic that of Harvey’s so as to suggest that, indeed, these are the voices of such fallen soldiers echoing through the mire. It also places Harvey herself more directly in the situation she’s recreating, caught in the crossfire so as to bolster her connection with the listener. With On Battleship Hill, it’s bone-chilling how a remark like “Cruel nature has won again” turns into a ghostly riddle whilst retaining such a magnificent melody when two voices, as opposed to just one, are behind it.

As the record moves on it never loses it’s balance, and credit is due to Harvey for always believing that less is more. On Bitter Branches, soldiers are torn away from their wives while the imagery of twisted branches and the rambling roots of trees double as a perfect metaphor for yearning and longing, the desperate anticipation to wait for news that may never come. On paper, the lyrics of Shake are descriptive in the most literal sense. Harvey describes everything her eyes see, what her nose smells, what her ears hear and what her hands touch. It could end there, but the genius of the record lies in how she inflects these words with an emotional poignancy that connects the listener on such a level of intimacy by direct association. For forty minutes she stares the listener squarely in the eyes. Hanging In The Wire and Written On The Forehead are dreamier numbers which float in a state of surrealist rapture, but imagery of blood, fire, barbed wire and fetid rivers continually drive home the notion of despair. Through a craft that is earwormy in nature, these songs become endlessly repeatable. There’s a deep intricacy to everything here but also a very direct, forwardly momentum which simultaneously comforts in its familiarity and captivates in its documenting of life and death.

Throughout Shake, Harvey rummages around in the trenches beneath all obvious conclusions instead of lecturing about the nature of war or wagging her finger at the way in which current political conflicts are justified. Yes, war is bloody and futile. Yes, it’s stupid and pointless, and we haven’t learnt much after thousands of years of inflicting pain and suffering upon one another. As is to be expected of her stance, the roots of her questioning run much deeper to a point where she aims to connect the listener by boiling everything down to the idea of one man against another. Let England Shake is a modern classic a year after its release, that all too rare breed of album that demands respect and attention from all those who have come across it. I saw Harvey perform these songs at the Troxy in Limehouse a few weeks after the record’s release and again, eight months later, at the Royal Albert Hall. The difference was in how Harvey commanded her arrangements and how the audience responded to them. As the year was drawing to a close and these songs acquired a familiarity from entering into the recent past, Harvey appeared on stage like a war correspondent, as if arriving to tell stories of the horrors her eyes and ears had experienced. Her audience will always listen patiently, paying her a respect and attention that is very rare in contemporary music, for she has dared to seek out an aspect of humanity within all of us that has gone virtually untapped. Opening your heart to Let England Shake is what makes it so very special.

http://1yron.tumblr.com/post/1761498354 ... land-shake

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Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

Let England Shake – PJ Harvey

NOV 28

Posted by ventilateblog


I should start by saying that I’m only familiar with PJ Harvey’s very early stuff, and somehow missed what she’s done for most of her career. Nonetheless, this album, released in February of 2011, has recently grabbed me.

Every generartion since time immemorial has its war music, and the topic crosses through every genre, from the bombastic 1812 Overture and Benjamin Britten’s landmark War Requiem, to the 1960′s folk protest song. The reason is obvious – war stirs extreme and confusing emotions and experiences, and the arts addressing it try to make some sense of it, for both those directly, and indirectly involved.

In Let England Shake, PJ Harvey and filmmaker Seamus Murphy take a hard look back at the defining conflicts their country has experienced over the past century, and reinterpret that history in a way that addresses the current war generation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The danger in making art about war is that one will become too heavy-handed, but Harvey and Murphy navigate the territory well, not shying away from being explicit, but not indulging in it. There are countless war songs out there, but no artist has surmounted the challenges of making an entire album on the topic. As the NME put it: “Francis Ford Coppola can lay claim to the war movie. Ernest Hemingway the war novel. Polly Jean Harvey, a 41-year-old from Dorset, has claimed the war album. And like Coppola and Hemingway, calls it straight…”

The lyrics are succinct and the musical production is hazy and ethereal, at times verging on the raw distorted psychedelia of the Velvet Underground and Mazzy Star. Each song develops constantly, and ends differently than it begins. The changes are often disjointed, which match well the jarring nature of violence. Atop this dreamlike bed, Harvey’s voice is powerful and plaintive, and recalls the folk singers of the 1960′s.

The music alone is a masterpiece, but one cannot talk about Let England Shake without including the equally brilliant films that accompany each song. War photographer Seamus Murphy treats his videos in much the same way as Harvey approaches her music – not shy, but not over-the-top; hard and soft in equal measure.

Much of his footage is of daily life in England and, with the music, create an elegy to a home that is lost in nostalgia and memories. When you miss something, even mundane details carry weight. Murphy captures that feeling poetically in his images. Each video begins with a person (Murphy engages everyday people for his scenes) reciting some of the lyrics of the following song. It’s an element that draws you in an unusual and intimate way.

The work reflects on the past – in fleeting images, and in references to the slaughter of trench warfare, and the Gallipoli Campaign, a horrific and tragic episode of World War I which has long been the inspiration of English-speaking songwriters. It also, of course, tries (all one can do with such a topic is try) to address the impact of our current conflicts, and to address both the nobility and tragedy of war. Most poignantly, it also considers the future – how history repeats itself, and how the generation that follows ours may be resigned to further futile killing.

Albums that can stand as a continuous piece of coherent and developing thought are very hard to come by. Add the fact that Let England Shake has been created around such an incredibly thorny topic as war and you have a masterful piece of art.

http://ventilateblog.wordpress.com/2012 ... pj-harvey/

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Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

http://eponymistuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/ ... m-p-j.html

(spotted on http://www.pollyharvey.co.uk/)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelqPcoaAB8"