A sort of review:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/fe ... ock-n-roll

The first time I listened to PJ Harvey's new album, Let England Shake, I was hit amidships. Recorded live in a church in Dorset, with John Parish, Mick Harvey and Flood, these songs seem a continuation of a journey she began on White Chalk (and, apparently, work began on the record around the same time), with its title song a tribute to the hills of Dorset: "White chalk hills are all I've known/ White chalk hills will rot my bones."

Many of the songs on Let England Shake are framed by war and by landscape, exploring a national heritage that is as bloody and militaristic as it is pastoral. "How is our glorious country ploughed?" she asks at one point. "Not with iron ploughs/ The land is ploughed with tanks and feet." And elsewhere: "Are your men hid with guns/ In the dirt, in the dark places?" as if our barbarism, our belligerence, is sown deep in the dark, damp earth of this land.

It is an album that marries bugle calls and reggae, the Book of Revelations and the Battle of the Nek, the past and the present and the future. But, more than anything, Let England Shake seems Harvey's effort to articulate her muddled emotions towards her homeland. In a track named simply England she gives a kind of skewed patriotism, a taste of her confusion: "I live and die through England, through England," she sings. "It leaves a sadness." In the exquisite On Battleship Hill, she tells of "Jagged mountains jutting out/ Cracked like teeth in a rotting mouth."

The England she paints is not beautiful exactly, not the green and pleasant idyll of the popular imagination, but a dear and bruised and bedraggled thing: "Take me back to beautiful England and the great and filthy mess and ages and battered books and fog rolling down behind the mountains on the graveyards and dead sea captains," she sings on The Last Living Rose.

There is something strangely intimate in singing about the country that bore you, in voicing that great mingling of love and resentment, that strange ache of longing for a land that is ugly and tarnished and cruel, and yet still somehow belongs to us: "To you, England, I cling," Harvey sings. "Undaunted, never failing love for you, England."

Album review: PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Island)





Polly Harvey’s mission statement for each of her albums has always been simple: it must be the polar opposite of her last one. Always questing, never satisfied, her eighth solo album once again finds her setting off on unchartered territory.

If there has been one uniting factor of much of her earlier material, it’s that she’s been a songwriter who draws in internal rather than external conflicts - long nights of the soul, the trials and tribulations of love and general existential angst.

So Let England Shake is that rarest of beasts, an album which deals in outward-looking issues such as politics, history and England’s heritage and global status.

Familiar collaborators return once more to the fold. Let England Shake is co-produced by Flood, a veteran of 1995’s To Bring You My Love and Polly’s superb White Chalk album of fours years ago. Long-time foils John Parish and ex-Bad Seed Mick Harvey also boast production credits alongside Polly.

The striking dynamics and Harvey’s subtle shifts in vocal style from White Chalk also have a bearing here. Let England Shake was recorded in a windswept 19th century. church in her home county of Dorset and it’s clear that the natural surroundings play a key part in the atmosphere of these songs.

Harvey’s feelings about her homeland are complex with emotions of pride and disgust/embarrassment pulling her in several directions, sometimes within the same song.

She’s clearly been hitting the books, too, as Let England Shake features three songs directly inspired by the battle for Gallipoli which decimated armies in Australia and New Zealand.

The title track opener finds Harvey returning to the eerie falsetto of White Chalk set against a musical box melody and a restrained band performance.

For The Last Living Rose, Harvey’s contradictory feelings of her country are laid bare: “Goddamn Europeans! Take me back to beautiful England, and the great and filthiness of ages and battered books and fog rolling down behind the mountains on th egraveyeards and dead sea captains…” For her, this is a land of “stinking alleys and drunken beatings”, yet she still finds beauty in her landscape.

A huntsman’s bugle call cuts across the beat of This Glorious Land to create an unsettling tone as the track unfurls into a mutant take on ancient English folk. A 21st century makeover of Wicker Man music, if you will.

War-time imagery informs the sinister nursery rhyme atmosphere of The Words That Maketh Murder, with just the slightest light relief of a cheeky Eddie Cochrane steal: “What if I take my problems to the United Nations…?”

The woozy All and Everyone and On Battleship Hill both reference Gallipoli to dramatic effect, the latter shuffling along on brushed drums and Parish’s jangling guitar lines as well as a positively angelic and highly stylised contribution from Harvey. It’s almost choral.

North African influences seem to inform England, funnily enough. A deliberate incongruity perhaps. Meanwhile, Bitter Branches is a more traditional slice of urgent, indie rock.

Allusions to the natural world dominate delicate piano ballad, Hanging on the Wire, which finds Harvey desolate and haunted.

Written On The Forehead will already be familiar to PJH fans after trailing the album back in November. It’s a heady stew of ghostly atmospherics, acutely descriptive lyrics offset against a reggae sample of Niney The Observer’s Blood & Fire. On paper it sounds disjointed, but in reality these elements are natural bedfellows and a clear stand-out here.

We end with another nursery rhyme-like melody on The Colour of the Earth, another Gallipoli-referencing track and a duet with drummer Jean-Marc Butty.

Harvey remains a singular songwriter, combining these far-reaching and often obscure influences could be a hard sell but she’s pulled it off with ease. This is a solo album that stands shoulder to shoulder with her very best.

Released: February 14
Scores on the doors: 9/10

by Steve Harnell

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^ I can't remember if that's a review which has been posted or not, I found it on tumblr.

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Thanks. So the cover and most of the artwork is based on her drawings. Interesting!

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I'll rub it, until it...

Hello again,
has been quite a long Time since i posted anything......
...each Time when i wanted to contribute something it was already done (good Boys and Girls ))), but this one i suppose is a new One :-)

Cheers

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/the ... 45911.html

PJ Harvey took poetry classes and learned to play the autoharp for her stunning new album Let England Shake . And it’s only now that she’s had the confidence to take on the world, penning songs that take in battlefields, bloodshed and bleak landscapes – but with a mercifully upbeat backing. She talks to SINÉAD GLEESON .

IN A LONDON boutique hotel on a drizzle-filled day, Polly Jean Harvey is perched on a sofa that almost swallows her up. She’s tiny. Petite. Diminutive. All of the above.

Then there’s her disproportionately huge eyes. She is dressed in black, friendly and relaxed, with a hint of wariness. Far more striking in person, she, like most artists, is professional about publicity chats with journalists.

She is here to promote her exceptional new album, Let England Shake , a whirling dervish of a record and a very distant relative of predecessor White Chalk . The latter was an eerie, painfully introspective record, but these songs are much more about the external world and feel less personalised.

“Yes, I think it would be fair to say that. It’s certainly a record that’s looking outwards at the world around us. In the past, I’ve been more interested in the external landscape of emotion and relationships and the way we deal with each other. This time, it’s still those issues I’m addressing, but in much more tangible, concrete language. I wanted the record to be communal, so that it was open for other people to come in and take hold of it.”

This shift from the inner to the outer world is represented by the themes she explores. There’s war – from Gallipoli to Afghanistan – immigration, England and Englishness. Months before the record was released, she performed the title track on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show , a programme more synonymous with politics than music. Is she political?

“Always. All my life, I’ve been profoundly interested in what’s happening in the world we live in. When I talk about England, I wanted ambiguity, so that I could talk about emotions that anybody might feel regardless of what country they live in. I tried to describe those feelings of love/hate and push/pull that you have with your country of origin. All of the disappointments and hopes that you have.”

Harvey admits that despite her lifelong political leanings, she couldn’t have written a record like this before now. “I’m an instinctive writer, and there was a sense of urgency about tackling issues – and with the right language – that affect me now. It’s taken me a long time to gather my confidence in my writing. If you’re going to deal with such weighty subject matter, you have to do it well or don’t do it at all. I didn’t have the confidence to try to write like this until three or four years ago.”

That confidence possibly came with a change in her songwriting process, something she has altered over the years. Where once it was led by guitars and even her voice, she says that words are now her “primary concern”. Harvey writes every day, not just songs but poetry that sometimes mutates into lyrics, short stories or even plays. The words that became the backbone of Let England Shake have been percolating for years.

“It took me a long, long time to write these lyrics. I worked on them for nearly three years. Just words. No music. I had to discard a lot of it that wasn’t working, and would only save one line from 20, but that’s just part of the process.”

The discipline of writing every day makes sense for a writer. I ask about a rumour I’d heard that, while the album was in progress, she took a poetry class to learn about rhyme and metre.

“Oh yes, I have done. Over my years as a writer, say the last 20 years, I’ve always kept learning. It’s very important to me, so I often go and do writing classes or painting or drawing classes. Even language classes. I’m always doing night school.”

She puts this down to a curiosity for new things. For the new album she learned to play autoharp, just as she’d learned piano for White Chalk .

“The autoharp is linked to what I said about learning. I like to try new experiments in terms of sound and language. Ones that will lead me into new areas. And there are lots of ways of playing an instrument I’m very familiar with, like the guitar. Physically you can affect it’s sound just by how you play it.”

Harvey lives in rural Dorset, not far from her parents. When she’s not making music she paints and draws, but thinks of herself as a full-time writer. It’s interesting she chooses this word over “musician”.

“They’re all linked, they’re all inter- connected. Painting, music, writing: they’re just different ways of articulation.”

This expression extends to her physicality and the way she represents herself on stage. The once-garish make-up and Stars and Stripes sequinned bra were pure theatre and a playful take on persona.

“What I wear on stage, the lighting, where people are standing – all of that is quite important to me. I’m a visual artist, so I think very visually even when I’m dealing with sound. Often I can see the way a song should sound before I make the sound. I can see it, almost in colours . . . ”

She trawls off and I ask if perhaps she has synaesthesia. “Yes, maybe it is a bit of that all right. Sometimes I know the subject I want to discuss, but I know it more by essence than by words.”

At this points she bursts into “what am I talking about?” laughter. The huge smoky eyes that dominate her face light up. Harvey is quite shy and fiercely protective of her privacy. Her relationship with singer Nick Cave is well-documented, but questions about her private life are not entertained, although she will admit she’s a big reader (she loves James Joyce, Harold Pinter and TS Eliot).

People’s urge to know more about her often leads to a rush to interpret her songs as autobiography, which irks her, especially when it’s clear she hasn’t drowned a daughter (Down by the Water) or killed any soldiers (The Words That Maketh Murder).

“It’s still a relatively new phenomenon that songwriters sing their own songs. So many songs are about first-hand experience, but a lot are much more about adopting perspectives or different lives purely as a way of articulating points of view that aren’t your own. There are a lot of voices on this record, and I was fearful that people would think it was me being preachy or dogmatic. I tried very hard to make the narrator of these songs impartial, to merely narrate the action.”

That action takes in battlefields, bloodshed and bleak landscapes, but the musical backdrop is upbeat. There’s a rousing bugle on the title track and a swirling rush of sounds all the way through. There’s even a sample of Niney the Observer’s reggae classic Blood Fire (“I love reggae!” she says, but won’t elaborate). Long-term collaborators John Parrish, Flood and Mick Harvey are all involved, and it’s a credit to their collective creative partnerships that through years of working together they’re still able to reinterpret and reinvent Harvey’s sounds.

“I always like working with a variety of people, and I knew these players were the ones that could bring the songs to their fruition. I wanted the music to be quite fluid and indefinable and I was after that swirling sound that you talked of. For me, there needed to be a certain confusion about the music, to echo the times we’re living in. I also wanted them to have a big melodic quality, and to be songs that would lend themselves to being sung by many people, many voices.”

The album was recorded in a cliff-top church close to where the singer lives. It took just five weeks (as opposed to White Chalk ’s five months), and she says it was recorded live, with everyone playing together.

“It had to be recorded like that because it’s a record about community. I needed the musicians to react to each other to get that energy on the record. Most of the songs were recorded with two or three takes of everyone playing them.”

Let England Shake is another triumph in Polly Harvey’s career. It’s an immutable piece of work, brilliant in its range and inventiveness.

“With this record, I’ve been thinking about the fact that we’re all from all over the place, and we’re all interconnected. It comes back to the way human beings relate to each other, which I’ve always done as a writer, in all my songs.”

England is mine

Three Lions

PJ Harvey looks at nationality and Englishness on her new album, but she’s not the first to slay that old dragon.

* MORRISSEY

From the geographical name-checking of Panic to the self-examination of Irish Blood, English Heart , Moz has always been interested in Britishness, even if his Union flag-waving remains ambiguous.

* PETE DOHERTY

Diamond Geezer Doherty wears his Englishness like a bad trilby, from The Libertines’ Likely Lads track to Babyshambles’ titular nod with Down in Albion.

* KATE BUSH

On Oh England , my Lionheart Kate Bush talks of Peter Pan, Kensington Park, London Bridge, Shakespeare, Spitfires and the Thames. There’s a definite connection between the song and PJ’s The Last English Rose .

^ Nice find! Welcome back zeez!

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

first italian's magazine cover story of PJ's new album
http://www.rumoremag.com/home.htm

if somedody's intrested I can scan pages...

^ That would be wonderful Black Hearted Love. And thank you for the offer

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here it is
http://postimage.org/gallery/5bfleltvs/

^ Thank you =)

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http://www.list.co.uk/article/32469-pj- ... and-shake/

There she goes, marching forth, marking irretrievable distance between her military coat-tails and the rest of the contemporary rock battalion flagging in her wake. Again.

A glance at the track-list and a cursory scan through PJ Harvey’s staggering eighth solo album may suggest that we are grooving on familiar territory – that is, a realm of bluesy, pastoral rock as embellished by long-term allies John Parish, Mick Harvey and Flood; plotted by song titles that reference murder, darkness and bitterness – but don’t be fooled.

Where previously Harvey has explored the insular, the personal and the physiological; the folkloric, the gothic and the symbolic; so now she excavates her land, its heritage and its bloody conflicts. She’s looking backwards, looking outwards, and wrestling with questions of national identity.

The album may be embedded in clarion autoharp, brass fanfares, and sing-a-long handclaps, but it sure ain’t pretty. On ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’, for example, Harvey sings of shot-up bodies and decapitated limbs hanging out of trees in a playful, nigh-angelic cadence that’s augmented by sunny rockabilly riffs. This contrast – conflict, even – between welcoming melodies and horrifying imagery is at the heart of Let England Shake’s dramatic and compelling force.

From the Cocteaus-reggae of ‘Written on the Forehead’ through the protest-folk of ‘The Colour of The Earth’, this is a weighty, thrilling undertaking. ‘This Glorious Land’, meanwhile, is a delirious album highlight and signals Harvey’s first-ever foray into bugle-pop. Clearly she still has much ground to cover. Let us hope she never rests.

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

NME's 10 out of 10 review

http://www.gigwise.com/reviews/albums/6 ... and-Shake'

Commonly referred to as a concept album, Polly Harvey’s eighth studio album stays true to the singer’s adamancy in never repeating herself. Focused on the matter of country and war, the piano balladry of previous album, White Chalk gives way to an eccentric and vehemently nervous mode of English folk and blues.

Recorded live in a 19th Century Dorset Church, the multi-instrumental and often sinewy support sounds from well-known friends and collaborators, Mick Harvey and “soul mate” John Parish, compliment Polly’s highly-registered vocals throughout, giving the record urgent yet fluid, reverberating and endlessly resonant acoustics.

With the very first words, “Let England shake/ weighed down with silent dead,” set against a cymbal laden, wind accompanied Autoharp backing; we are thrown straight into an atmospheric world of historical recollection and experience. “I was looking outwards a lot more,” Polly told the BBC’s Andrew Marr in May, last year. The result is a Harold Pinter inspired, poetic lament on all the “orphaned children” of colonisation and war, on the dispossessed of not only England, but the world.

With references to various disasters, including Constantinople, Bolton Ridge and even Galipoli, it is clear that the sense of timelessness and mystery we regularly associate Polly with, has not ceased on this album. It is a comment on history constantly repeating itself, on the inevitable conflicts- both internationally and emotionally, that don’t end with certain periods of time. This is evident, for example, in song 'Battleship Hill', where “the scent of time” is “carried on the wind,” and where the almost chant-like refrain of “cruel nature’s won again” acts as a soundtrack to the full album, and fuller world: the relationships deeply rooted within all of politics; between human beings, states, and one and one’s self.

The almost violent language of 'The Words That Murder Maketh' echoes those of a Wilfred Owen or a Thomas Hardy, and the ironic question of “what if I take my problem to the United Nations” references current, unresolved struggles. Through the raw guitar sounds, high notes and decent into spoken chorus of 'In The Dark Places', Harvey and Parish answer this very question, that “not one man has/ not one woman has/ revealed the secrets of this world.” They probably never will.

And it is this notion of exploration that attaches to the album; a degree of emotional depth and power, and that allows it to transcend a mere, socio-political analysis. Let England Shake looks not only to the world around, but simultaneously to the world within. It has a touch of that haunting innocence we so distinctly recall from White Chalk, imbued with an almost undefinable and eclectic, musical sound.

Through drawing on the environment in an intelligent and simple way, PJ Harvey has created yet another rare and unique masterpiece, proving that her constantly maturing musical journey has certainly come to fruition, on this one.

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

do we have this one? if so... sorry, if not here we are >

http://www.wearsthetrousers.com/2011/02/pj-harvey-let-england-shake/

PJ Harvey
Let England Shake
Arriving at a time when the robustness of our national identity, our very Britishness, is under closer government scrutiny than ever, PJ Harvey’s ninth album Let England Shake is a startling exploration of this very subject from a brutally human perspective. A searing, vivid and complex analysis of how far the Bramley apples have dropped from the tree over a century of conflict and political manoeuvring at home and abroad, it repeatedly slices to the core of the matter without ever passing judgement or laying blame. This may sound ambiguous to the point of irritation, but Harvey is much too smart a wordsmith to get hit from both sides by sticking to the middle of the road. With Let England Shake she has adopted the role of reporter, zigzagging through space and time to inhabit the personae of agitators and observers, fighters and survivors from her homeland to the coastline of France (‘All & Everyone’) and the Gallipoli peninsula (‘On Battleship Hill’). And it’s her remarkable self-discipline that holds it all together.

Former Secretary of State Tony Benn once remarked sagely that “All war represents a failure of diplomacy,” and this speculative balancing act is reflected in more than one facet of Let England Shake‘s brilliance. Harvey strives for parity in impressively fastidious ways, the most obvious being her combining of appalling, emphatically mortal imagery of war and decimation with supple, jaunty instrumentals, playful intonations and celebratory chanting. Then there’s her carefully refined ability to alleviate some of her denser poetry (all of Let England Shake‘s songs were consolidated first as standalone poems) with the occasional shot of stoic, spectacularly blunt observation. The bugle playing ‘Reveille’ that interjects ‘This Glorious Land’ is a musical equivalent of this, just as the saxophone in ‘The Last Living Rose’ (played by Polly herself) feels grossly inappropriate and yet so right. Likewise, where the Middle Eastern prayer call that colours the background of the sour and conflicted ‘England’ could have been a heavy-handed addition, Harvey’s stringent creative process turns it into a perfect example of her ability to successfully convey associations beyond what comes out of her mouth.

It’s through inventive touches like these that Harvey adds fascinating new depths to the songs’ page-bound beginnings. She may no longer be writing with the blistering intensity of her early work but damned if she’ll let you settle for long on any one interpretation of her true perspective. Another, unprecedented trick for Harvey on Let England Shake is the use of samples and borrowed motifs to create different moods. Niney The Observer’s reggae hit ‘Blood & Fire’ from 1970 gives the curiously bleak account of a destructed society in ‘Written On The Forehead’ an exotically mournful, contemporary quality, while only Harvey could reappropriate a lyric as patently silly as “What if I take my problems to the United Nations?” – adapted from Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ and repeated here as the coda to ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’ – and make it work so deliriously well. Similarly, the title track’s translation of the melody of the Four Lads’ ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ to a xylophone riff is skewed but inspired, one of many touches to lend Harvey’s music a looseness that we haven’t really seen from her before.

Like the clunky piano of White Chalk before it, the most constant feature of Let England Shake is the presence of a detuned autoharp. Its drone-like mien as a result of subtle chord changes is built into the instrumental bed of almost every song from ‘Let England Shake’ to the war-torn elegy of ‘The Colour Of The Earth’, the closing duet between Harvey and stalwart John Parish. It’s particularly effective on the standout ‘On Battleship Hill’, morphing from its rhythmic start into a taut, shivering rattle that mirrors Harvey’s lyrical description of stinging winds, falling away to allow her piercing falsetto full domain. Similar to the white chalk hills of her last album that stood “against time”, Harvey charts a troubled history through the rocks and even a wistfully picked out piano refrain can’t warm the chill that anchors the song. “A hateful feeling still lingers / even now, eighty years later,” cries Harvey, obliquely resigning the fates of the men who died at The Nek in World War I to “cruel, cruel nature.”

Whatever polarity you have regarding Harvey’s back catalogue, let’s not take to arms about this: Let England Shake is an indisputable triumph. Ambitious and accessible, it rewards all of Harvey’s efforts in radicalising her artistic focus and further signals a shift on the audience’s part from feeling her music primarily on a visceral, gut level to engaging with it intellectually. Harvey offers no answers, it’s true, but it’s impossible to absorb Let England Shake and not consider your own connection to and understanding of your homeland. The best thing about it, though, is that twenty years into her incredible career it feels like Polly Harvey is only just discovering the true extent of her skill.

http://drownedinsound.com/releases/1595 ... 995?ticker

by Andrzej Lukowski

Last year, my girlfriend’s parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas; this was not a query I'd anticipated, and thus resulted in a rather glib request for ‘A bottle of whisky. Or a book about the First World War. Because I’m old now’. And you know, it was sort of meant as a joke, but when a litre of whisky and two books on WWI appeared on December 25th, I cannot deny that all three items proved to be thoroughly moreish. And if interest in the Great War in mounting proportion to one's age is bit of a middle class British cliché, then at least I’m in good company, because PJ Harvey has just written an album on the subject entitled Let England Shake, and it is astonishing.

Overtones of violence aside, Polly Jean Harvey’s eighth studio album represents an almost total break with the music the original PJ Harvey trio made in the early Nineties. From her subsequent career, the girly, ethereal falsetto of White Chalk has been retained, as have musicians John Parrish, Mick Harvey and producer Flood. And that’s about it.

Certainly it’s a case of blues rock out, ‘The Last Post’ in. That centuries old bugle call for British war dead is deployed as a statement of intent three tracks into Let England Shake. Eerily puncturing the lustrous dreamfolk of ‘The Glorious Land’, the bugle offer a constant, jarring reminder of entropy and decay as Harvey’s guitar pulses like weak sun caressing an old battlefield, her voice trilling a macabre lullaby: “How is our glorious country ploughed? Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet” runs the first verse; “What is the glorious fruit of our land? Its fruit is deformed children” she concludes. A chorus of “Oh, America, Oh England” feels both opaque and laden with intent; you can frame the song as a comment on Western imperial endeavour, or you can view it as an awesomely foreboding nursery rhyme - the record is a possessed of a certain revulsion towards war, but it is entirely without polemic.

But the bulk of the songs clearly are directly concerned with the First World War. You might even push things so far as to call Let England Shake a concept album about Anzac troops in the Gallipoli Campaign. “Death hung in the smoke and clung to 400 acres of useless beachfront” Harvey keens during the stinging mania of ‘All and Everyone’; ‘On Battleship Hill’ takes its name from the site of the battle of Chunuk Bair, Harvey forcing her voice above the guitar's luminescent thrum, approximating the pitch of some sorrowful celestial onlooker as she cries: “On Battleship Hill’s caved in trenches a hateful feeling still lingers, even now, 80 years later; Cruel nature has won again”; and the concluding ‘The Colour of the Earth – with vocals by the Australian Mick Harvey – is a homage to the homespun songs of the trenches: “_Louis was my dearest friend, fighting in the Anzac trench, Louis ran forth from the line, I never saw him again _” he intones with rough, sing-song wistfulness. Elsewhere ‘In The Dark Places’, ‘Bitter Branches’, ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ and ‘Hanging in the Wire’ have vaguer geography, but offer no less beautiful visions of carnage(‘Hanging…’ being particularly spine tingling, a disturbingly lovely, painterly account of a soldier’s corpse suspended in barbed wire in No Man’s Land).

Yet for all these accounts of foreign fields, it is home soil that hovers like a wraith in the background. “England’s dancing days are done” , Harvey coos on the title track; this is an album about the passing of something more than men's lives. In the shimmering guitar patterns and aching vocal melodies, in the sense of lament and elegy, the sparkling minor keys and exquisite acoustic guitars, there’s the sense of something glorious and romantic ending. The slaughtered Anzacs, the suspended private in ‘Hanging in the Wire’, the “soldiers dropping like lumps of meat” from ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’; they’ve died for the once gleaming, now gone ideal of Great Britain. Let England Shake is neither damning, patriotic, nor angry and its gristly lyrics do not dictate the mood. It is a record marked by a weary wonder at the departure of something huge from the world – Victorian invention and enterprise, the age of discovery and the monolithic cruelty of empire, all fading to a half-remembered dream.

Stripped down to White Chalk-style bare bones, this would still be something very special – Harvey’s glittering high register is prettier and often genuinely more unsettling than her blooze growl, and these are the finest lyrics she's ever written. But the music is something else, dreamy and inviting but with a wild, danceable Old World pulse. There’s a wild eyed euphoria to it all, one that comes from sudden sunlit rushes of brass, semi submerged rhumba rhythms, intoxicating call and response backing vocals, and brazen nods to popular hits (‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ cribs the line “I’m gonna take my problem to the United Nations” from Eddie Cochrane’s ‘Summertime Blues’).

Writing this, it occurs that despite prevailing wisdom about the state of the music scene today, 2011 can’t be that bad if, just two months in, a reclusive 41-year-old woman gets to release her First World War-based masterpiece on a major label. England’s dancing days might be over, but things could be worse.

9/10