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

video review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-IGABC6rlU

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

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

nice one: they look and sound like a steam-powered Radiohead (which even within the comparison is original)... with songs that prick your conscience and pierce your heart
spot on!

_________________
'Good Golly, Miss Polly!'

Can't Metacritic throw in another couple of great reviews of LES to push it into #1, AHEAD of George Michael, "Faith: Special Edition"?

_________________
pack up your troubles, let's head out to the fountain of death and splash about

^ haha. George Michael!

'shakes head'

_________________

I don't think anyone posted this review yet, it's a thoughtful one.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/ ... -painting/

Average review in latest Record Collector. 3 out of 5 stars. Reviewer called it detached/unengaging, words to that effect...

_________________
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

More incredible reviews on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Let-England-Sha ... 831&sr=1-1

_________________
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

_________________
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

Singer/songwriter
http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=292675
PJ Harvey. "Let England Shake." Vagrant.

Anyone left standing around waiting for PJ Harvey to re-emerge as the screaming banshee she was in the 1990s should just move along.

Her latest album, "Let England Shake," should make it clear - if the rest of her output in the 2000s hasn't already - that she's charting a different path, never to return to the proto-rock sound that so electrified rock 'n' roll at a time when it desperately needed a kick in the pants.

Even by Polly Jean Harvey's standard, "Let England Shake" is a wild departure from almost anything we have seen before from the British singer. Her eighth record is always interesting, at turns beautiful and bewildering. It is an inspiring attempt to make something more than transitory art in four minutes or less. This is unique and ageless and permanent.

"Let England Shake" is the always thought-provoking Harvey's way of reflecting the ills of her country as it founders in a new millennium. This is no protest album and there is no preaching to the masses.

On the title-track opener she declares "England's dancing days are done ," and then launches into a withering deconstruction of the once great empire. Rather than rail at the masters of war as a young Dylan did, though, she paints pictures of outcomes and end results from decisions made by those forces.

She sings of "deformed children" as the "glorious fruit of our land" on "The Glorious Land." On "The Words That Maketh Murder" she sings "I have seen and done things I want to forget" and goes on to describe the horrors of war.

Her portraits of England and its place in the world - past and present - are dark and bleak and have the feel of history. And truth.

They leave more questions than they answer: Do these songs resonate in Harvey's home country? Do they stir shame in the heart of the blind patriot? Do they rouse the rabble? Is this a heroic and subversive protest album or a Stygian travelogue for the discontent?

In the end, Harvey as usual ends up accomplishing what very few of her peers can do these days: She's making us think.

Check out this track: With longtime collaborators Flood, Mick Harvey and John Parish on board, every song is musically rich and interesting, so let's head into unusual territory here and highlight "Written on the Forehead." It's the least conventional song here, a fever dream of an apocalyptic vision that's punctuated by a "Blood & Fire" sample from Winston "Niney the Observer" Holness and the haunting chorus, "Let it burn, let it burn ."

- By Chris Talbott
The Associated Press

From The Consequence of Sound

http://consequenceofsound.net/2011/02/a ... and-shake/

by Nick Freed

PJ Harvey is one of the few artists who can release different material with a different focus and sound on each album and have it always be good. Her latest album, Let England Shake, is a lush, well-constructed, and passionate open letter to her home country of England—a rare outward focus rather than her usual inward, personal, and biting focus.

My exposure to Harvey is somewhat limited to her Mercury Prize-winning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea—which is a bluesy, more straightforward affair that many called her greatest album when it came out in 2000—and a few tracks from 2007’s White Chalk. Harvey’s new album is a complete turnaround from Stories’ more alternative-rock style and White Chalk’s moody introspective lyrics. Harvey has let her natural accent come through strong and exaggerated, added some skiffle influences in the music, and her use of strings and horns create a sound that is similar to Radiohead’s use on recent albums. It all combines together to give Let England Shake a very, for want of a better word, English sound. It isn’t bluesy, or dark and brooding. It is strong, angry, powerful, bitter, but still churning and, at times, upbeat.

Harvey made sure to pick the perfect place to record this fantastic English album. She traveled to an old church in the countryside of England. The 19th Century church on a cliff-top in Dorset is the perfect setting for the songs on Let England Shake. The music benefits from the natural echo of the church and gives it an almost sanctified quality, especially in “All and Everyone” and “Hanging in the Wire”. Harvey’s auto-harp rings for days in what seems like the natural reverb of the space. Her voice has a shaky, almost Bjork-like quality to it that sounds absolutely incredible on songs like opener “Let England Shake”. The producer, Flood, allows her voice to ring and drift throughout the album—letting the church halls soak in and shoot out her beautiful tone—but he also knows when to bring it right to the listener’s ears. Her vocal tone fits the jingle of the auto-harp and lush strings perfectly. Harvey also utilizes a couple samples from other songs—including some lines from “Summer Time Blues” by Eddie Cochran in “The Words that Maketh Murder”, and the perfectly placed sample from “Blood and Fire” by Niney the Observer in “Written on the Forehead”. The latter sample is tucked back and soaked in just enough reverb to sound almost like a ghost moving in and out of the room.

Harvey’s lyrics have always been something to marvel at, but on this album they are nothing short of incredible. Album stand outs “Bitter Branches”, “Let England Shake”, “All and Everyone”, “The Words that Maketh Murder”, and “The Glorious Land” are incredibly poetic songs about England at war. The songs are filled with brutal images of fallen soldiers, presumably, from World Wars I and II. In the driving “Bitter Branches”, Harvey paints a wonderfully poignant picture of soldiers leaving home for the war, and “Holding up their rifles high/holding their young wives/who wave goodbye.” By the end, the soldiers are twisted in the earth in death and the wives’ arms are “bitter branches” that are “spreading into the world” as they “wave good-bye”. Harvey delivers the lines with venom and grace while the drums and guitars chug along underneath. The last note of “wave goodbye” lingers and rings on beautifully.

“All and Everyone” is an unflinching, straightforward description of what was awaiting those soldiers in the field: certain death. Right from the start, Harvey personifies Death and lays the lines “Death was everywhere/in the air/and in the sounds/coming off the mounds/on Bolton’s Ridge” on top of sparse and echoing autoharp. Her voice echoes all around you as the percussion builds and booms like bombs as she moves from the beaches to the forts where Death was “waiting in the copses/with hearts that threatened to pop their boxes” and “Death was all and everyone.” Harvey moves back to the beaches where “death hung in the smoke/and clung to 400 acres of useless beachfront”. Death returns in the “staring sun” to rattle the “bones of the Light Horsemen still lying out there in the open.” Harvey follows this with one of the best lines on the album: “as we, advancing in the sun, sing ‘Death to all and everyone.’”

The first verse of “The Words that Maketh Murder” is another perfect example of Harvey’s heartbreaking and vivid images. She smokes out: “I’ve seen and done things I want to forget/I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat/Blown and shot out beyond belief/Arms and legs were in the trees.” That vision of soldiers falling like “lumps of meat”, and “arms and legs” in the trees, has been hanging in my head for days. She goes on to added “flies swarming everyone” and “flesh quivering in the heat” to the mix, before ending the song on a driving beat and the refrain of the Cochran song being chanted in the background. It’s a moving song that refuses to leave your head, and lyrics that not only let me picture a WW I battle scene but also ties to modern war images.

This is one thing that I was also amazed by—the timeless quality the album has already. All the war images, and the graphic deaths, not only are tied closely to World War trench war fare, but also invoke modern images and battle footage of Vietnam, the Middle East, riots in the streets, any conflict of humans killing humans. Harvey has spot-on nailed the hopeless expanse of war and death in the name of progress. As she says in “On Battleship Hill”: “Cruel nature has won again.” It’s a theme that runs throughout the albums more battle-centered songs, and she has put it forward with deft skill and genius artistry.

There are also songs focused more on England as a whole. Harvey paints her usual dark and bleak picture of things in “Last Living Rose”:

Let me walk through the stinking alleys
to the music of drunken beatings
past the Thames River, glistening like gold
hastily sold for nothing.

But she then follows later in the song with a loving touch to England:

Let me watch nightfall on the river,
the moon rises up and turn to silver,
the sky move,
the ocean shimmer,
the hedge shake,
the last living rose quiver.

In “The Glorious Land”, she combines the England view with a peppering of war imagery in a call and response of “How is our glorious country ploughed?” and the answer of “Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet, feet marching.” The song ends with a haunting couplet asking “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” and having a chorus of children’s voices responding with “deformed children” and “orphaned children”—all with a military-like drum roll underneath. It’s an icy wind that blows right into the listener’s ear that will make you shift in your seat and just say, “wow.”

I have never given a full five stars to any album I’ve reviewed on this site—not even albums by some of my heroes—but this is one of the best albums I have heard in a while. It took me a few listens to fully appreciate it, and comprehend all that is going on with the lyrics and music, but I’m incredibly glad I did. It’s an awe-inspiring, challenging album in all the best ways. PJ Harvey has created an album that will be at the top of everyone’s “Best of” list come December. If this album doesn’t get rewarded and praised all year and for years to come it’s going to be an incredible disservice. The way Harvey has crafted not only a musically forceful, but a lyrically complex and powerful album is arresting and magnetic. It’s near impossible to write lyrics as descriptive and brutal as Harvey has and not weigh the album down with an overbearing morosity, but she has crafted the music to overcome all of it. This is the best album for 2011, and not just the last two months.

Mexican Mag review¡¡¡¡
http://www.circulomixup.com/noticias/fabulas-de-belleza-y-horror/

_________________
!!!! I love PJ Harvey...She changed my life forever ¡¡¡¡¡

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/bl ... -new-album

PJ Harvey's brilliant new album
By Simon Sweetman

When I first heard Let England Shake, the new album by PJ Harvey, I did not like it. I didn't like it at all. I just did not connect with it. The title song was okay, and I quite liked second track, The Last Living Rose. But I wrote it off as a misstep in her career; a mistake.

Something about the album didn't sit well with me - I thought it was a bit of a mess. But I wanted to carry on listening to it. I wanted to unravel it, rather than just write it off as the sound of PJ herself unravelling. That was my initial thought - after first hearing Let England Shake I thought I was listening to someone's mental decline through songs; a breakdown released as a record.

So why did I stick with Let England Shake?

Well - the title song and The Last Living Rose showed promise right from the start - so maybe I had been listening incorrectly? It can happen.

Recently I gave you all a chance to ask me some questions for a change - since I usually do the question-asking. And a couple of you asked me about times when I've changed my mind, or realised I was wrong, or performed a back-flip (in a reviewing sense). I have been working through those questions - we have one final post to go (so fear not, if your question has not been answered yet) but I struggled to think of times when I have changed my opinion in any great way when it comes to music. I acknowledged that it does happen. But I must have reviewed thousands of albums (it's rude to count, so I have no idea the true number). And, well, albums tend to go out of your head (and house) rather quickly - unless they are memorably awful or memorably brilliant.

So this new PJ Harvey album - which I wanted to write about, to recommend, to tell you to listen to, to ask if you had already - is now also an example (the most current in fact) of an album where, in a sense, I have done something of a backflip.

I should point out that I'm most definitely a PJ Harvey fan - have been for some time. I heard Rid of Me first and then really fell for To Bring You My Love. I went back to Dry after that. And then I forgot about PJ Harvey for a little bit - but I loved the Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea album (released in 2000). Since then I've been a keen hePJ fan, collecting everything. I flew to Sydney in 2004 to see her play on the back of the Uh Huh Her album. It was a great show - made all the more worthwhile when it was announced she was taking a significant break from touring (I talked about that recently, discussing gigs you travel to see).

That break signalled a sea-change for PJ Harvey. And in 2007 she returned with White Chalk - a staggeringly different album, haunting and haunted. She was singing in a far more fragile voice; gone was any semblance of the sharp pop singer/songwriter or the rock-chick - it was back to the artist, the pure artist. She had taught herself piano. The songs were stripped back, eerie. She toured in support of the album; again, stripped back instrumentally, a whole new sound palette had been created.

Let England Shake seemed bizarre to me at first, unnecessary almost; certainly confused. I know that many people have loved it instantly. And I know that there are some people out there - fans of Harvey's - who are still struggling with it.

I'd love to tell you that it's worth the struggle, carry on, it's a grower - you will learn to love it.

But for some people this album might be a dud. They might be happy to never bother, or they might not hear anything in it for them on the first or the eighth or eighteenth listen. We are all different when it comes to how we listen and engage with music; we all have different music that speaks to us. And music speaks to us in different ways.

I spent time with Let England Speak because I kept catching snatches of the lyrics and thinking that they were brilliant constructions.

This, from The Last Living Rose:
Goddamn Europeans!/Take me back to beautiful England/And the grey damp filthiness of ages/And battered books/And fog rolling down behind the mountains/On the graveyards and dead sea-captains./Let me walk through the stinking alleys/To the music of drunken beatings/Past the Thames river glistening/Like gold hastily sold/For nothing

Here's the link to the song again - if you want to hear it and read along.

It's my idea if a great lyric, an amazing piece of songwriting. There is poetry not just in the lyric but in the music that supports it.

On this album Harvey plays saxophone, among other instruments, using it to provide punctuation. Baritone honks are like semicolons; musical, slithering in to allow other words to follow on, to flow on.

It is not just a lyrically brilliant album - it's both a love letter to England and a (comment on a) death sentence; it's both told through the eyes of a character and starkly confessional/personal.

It is musically adventurous too. Most of the instruments provide dual roles, both melodic and rhythmic. The saxophone offering punctuation is also like a musical stop-sign. Drums and guitars chug together, percussion clicks and clatters and feels majestic. Layers of sound swell so that there is a well-blanketed bed of sound for the lyrics to lie in. Lying there, honest, moving, passionate.

I read an interview piece where Harvey claimed to spend up to a year working on the lyrics, the music mostly completed. The lyrics tweaked and picked at after, stitched into place with invisible thread.

This is an album that rewards repeat listens. I would think that'd be the case even if you fell in love with it instantly.

I'm going to go so far as to say that it's a masterpiece. And I'm certainly glad I kept listening to it, working through my issues with the music - what I mistook as a lack of focus was quite the opposite. This has been polished. It has been made with love. It is an album that stands out, that does not sound like anything else at the moment, or anything that came before it.

As an album it is almost without antecedent. Apart from some of PJ Harvey's own records. And even then, it stands out and away from her other work. That said, it also, in some sense, perfectly pulls together the pre-White Chalk material with White Chalk, closing the gap that might have been suggested, unifying Harvey's work.

It's remarkable to think that, in a recording career of 20 year with two collaboration albums (co-credited to John Parish), two demo collections and eight full-length solo albums, Harvey has, quite possibly, just released her finest album.

That's what I want from an artist.

I want to fall in and out of love with the works, to be challenged and to occasionally find some of them too challenging.

I also want to be wrong. And to feel like the music is so right. Even if I arrive there after other people. It's not a race. It's not about being right. Or coming first with the verdict. It's about connecting; finding connection.

And I've found a connection with PJ Harvey's brilliant new album. I've been rewarded for taking time with Let England Shake. For hearing it through many times and arriving out the other side feeling satiated - but wanting to hear it more. I actually can't get enough of this record right now. I need to hear it most days. Sometimes more than once.

I like that I'll be unpacking this album for months (years?) to come.

That might be something you dislike about the album. Maybe you don't have the time and you require that an album grab you instantly. Maybe this album did grab you instantly.

So what do you think? Have you heard it? Or are you interested to hear it? And do you agree that Harvey has, over two decades, continued to innovate, to impress, to improve, to offer something unique?

Some of the other things I like about this album are that PJ Harvey shows a sense of conflict with her home: she's confused about how she feels about England. She's proud of it and ashamed of it. I like that. She's also created a new distinctly English voice. This is no music-hall send up. It's not pastiche. But it is a distinctly English record. I like that too. She's also making a short film (music video) for every track from the album. And because I like that - and I like the album so much and want you to hear it (if you haven't) I'm going to link to all of the remaining songs on the album.

Click on these links to enjoy the rest of the album - some of these are with the accompanying video/film.

The Glorious Land, The Words That Maketh Murder, All and Everyone, On Battleship Hill, England, In the Dark Places, Bitter Branches, Hanging in the Wire, Written on the Forehead, The Colour of the Earth.

Also, at a time when we mourn what feels like the end of the album, a time when people seem to lack the patience to digest an album, this is most definitely an album, a unified collection of songs. It's just 40 minutes long. An almost perfect length for an album.

I'd love to know what you think - the links are all there. And if this does not interest you at all but you made it this far perhaps you can share an album that have spent a lot of time with and would like to recommend.