PJ Harvey At Terminal 5
http://www.nypress.com/blog-8764-pj-har ... nal-5.html
Tribal priestess, P.J. Harvey, took the stage at Terminal 5 on Wednesday. As an artist with continual incarnations, this one as a chieftess is replete with black feathered headdress harkening to native American ceremonial plumage and a white flowing dress, made for a goddess of song that defies time or place, yet who uncannily plays with both.
Her music on Wednesday, a presentation of her new collection of work on an album released in the U.S. in February, Let England Shake, is as much a mysterious confluence of styles as her costume (tribal beats, modern rock, Celtic folk-like vocals, to name a few). For this eighth album, she returns to a tribal, primitive aesthetic, with pounding, solemn and playful rhythms interlaced with repeating words that feel like a chant to an earth goddess.
The songs soar and spiral, but unlike the release offered to the audience in her earlier work, such as the iconic “Rid of Me” which spilled outward into a frenzy of intense emotion, and garnered her a loyal following, these songs build and build and then stop before any spillage happens. The primitive intensity, which may have been missing for some of her later albums, returns in this collection, but it is more controlled, and directed—as if stored up as a chant or a mantra, it may have powers of rejuvenation over the forces of anguish and devastation. Still, Harvey is devastating, and the sold out audience could feel the electric current in the air. This is Harvey at her goddess best.
The album is openly about war and its consequences and the role of nationhood in the making of the mess. Each song evokes images of war, oil fields burning in the Middle East (“Written on the Forehead”), a soldier dying (“The Colour of the Earth” sung with Mick Harvey) or the damage of the war on its participants such as in the lyric “I’ve seen and done things I want to forget,” (“Words that Maketh Murder). Trumpet fragments of English battle hymns in a couple of songs critically evoke the longing and sadness of belonging to a nation with all its contradictions, adding a specifically English touch to the trans-local theme.
Let England Shake was recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset, on a cliff-top overlooking the sea. Perhaps it’s the sea and the church that are leaving their imprint on this album, with primordial energy, emotion and wisdom speaking to our higher selves, through a musical language all her very own.
Even with the pic of the merch and the set list at the bottom!