A wonderful five star review from The Guardian by Alexis Petridis:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/fe ... ake-review


'Muted, misty and ­ambiguous' … PJ Harvey. Photograph: Seamus Murphy


PJ Harvey's new album finds her at something of a creative peak. Plus: it's got tunes


There are a multitude of options open to the modern rock star wishing to announce to the world that they have embarked on a new album. You can give interviews, allow webcams into your studio, offer a free download as a taster. Or you can appear on Andrew Marr's Sunday morning politics show in a feathered headdress, playing the autoharp over an incessant, off-key sample of the Four Lads' 1953 hit Istanbul (Not Constantinople), while a nonplussed Gordon Brown looks on. Thus did PJ Harvey seek to remind the world that she is not like other singer-songwriters, useful clarification for anyone who felt her offering to sodomise an errant male with a strap-on dildo (on 2009's A Woman A Man Walked By) suggested an artist cravenly bidding for the Katie Melua demographic.

Somehow, the recent news that Harvey had frequently received career advice from the late Captain Beefheart didn't come as that much of a surprise. It says something that Let England Shake, the album she chose to announce on the Andrew Marr Show last April – an opaque exploration of Englishness delivered in a high, keening voice, that contains not one, not two, but three harrowing songs that explicitly reference the 1915 Gallipoli campaign and a further handful that seem more generally informed by the carnage of the first world war – represents one of the more approachable albums in her oeuvre. If it's not as straightforward as the slick FM rock found on the Mercury prize-winning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (Captain Beefheart was apparently not a fan of that one), at least its 40 minutes passes without anyone getting anything shoved up their bum.

In fact, listeners used to Harvey in full-on, bug-eyed Dorset avenger mode might be slightly taken aback by Let England Shake. Not because of the preponderance of gorgeous tunes – if, in the past, Harvey has been guilty of making records one admires for their bloody-mindedness rather than enjoys for their songs, she's also proved herself capable of turning on the melodic charm at will. It's more a matter of tone. The music sounds muted, misty and ambiguous, which seems to fit with Harvey's vision of England: "The damp grey filthiness of ages, fog rolling down behind the mountains and on the graveyards and dead sea captains," she sings on The Last Living Rose.

Scrupulously avoiding the usual cliches that arise with self-consciously English music – Kinksy music-hall observations, eerie pagan folkisms, or shades of Vaughan Williams – the central sound is guitars, wreathed in echo that makes them seem as if they're playing somewhere in the middle distance. Around them are scattered muzzy electric piano, smears of brass, off-kilter samples and musical quotations: a reference to Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues somehow works its way into The Words That Maketh Murder, while an incessant trumpet reveille sounds during The Glorious Land, out of tune and time with the rest of the song. Somewhere along the way, the Four Lads have vanished – instead, their song's incongruously perky melody is played on a xylophone – but on Written on the Forehead, she performs a similar trick with an even more unlikely source – reggae singer Niney the Observer's Blood and Fire, a deceptively cheery paean to imminent apocalypse. Its weird juxtaposition of subject matter and mood infect the whole song, which is possessed both of a beautiful melody and a lyric about people trying to escape a rioting city and drowning in sewage.

Meanwhile, Harvey's voice certainly has its dramatic moments, as when it rockets into boy-soprano territory during On Battleship Hill, or unexpectedly takes on a carefully enunciated mock-aristocratic mien. But frequently what it most obviously evokes is a rather cool ambivalence. When she debuted her new high register on White Chalk, it sounded tremulous and spooked: here it's almost blank-eyed as she details The Words That Maketh Murder's battlefield carnage: soldiers falling "like lumps of meat", trees hung with severed limbs. It's a curious idea, but it's a masterstroke. Rock songwriters don't write much about the first world war, but, perhaps understandably, when they do, they have a tendency to lay it on a bit thick: you end up with songs like the Zombies' The Butcher's Tale, so ripe it sounds more like the work of a fromagier. Harvey clearly understands that the horror doesn't really need embellishing: her way sounds infinitely more shocking and affecting than all the machine-gun sound effects in the world.

You're left with a richly inventive album that's unlike anything else in Harvey's back catalogue. That, she told Marr last year, is the point: "My biggest fear would be to replicate something I've done before." Let England Shake sounds suspiciously like the work of a woman at her creative peak. Where she goes from here is, as ever, anyone's guess.

Review in today's Daily Mail.
By Adrian Thrills; 2 stars out of 5!

With the guitar-driven urgency of her early records gone, P.J. Harvey employs lapping percussion and an autoharp on an album inspired by the horrors of war. Harvey delves into military history to make her point but much of the music is too dreary to match Polly’s lyrical power.

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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

"Dreary?" I don't see that at all.

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Click to see the PJ Harvey Gigography

Review in today's Independent

4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Andy Gill

On what may be her best album, Polly Harvey offers a portrait of her homeland as a country built on bloodshed and battle, not so much a police state as a nation in thrall to military endeavour, however impotent and wasteful that has become. A place paralysed by fascination with past victories, hidebound by the ghosts of an imperial past.

Perhaps prompted by the nightmare atrocities of "The Soldier", from Harvey and John Parish's A Woman a Man Walked By, it's a picture both pathetic and poignant, the images of brutalising war mingled with her lingering affection for the country. "I live and die through England," she admits in the witchy invocation "England", acknowledging that "it leaves sadness, it leaves a taste, a bitter one." A bitterness that boils into anger as she surveys the wanton carnage in a song like "The Words That Maketh Murder", albeit the quiet anger of the coda sardonically recontextualising Eddie Cochran: "What if I take my problem to the United Nations?".

The song's rolling groove, as with the arrangements throughout the album, has a subdued, somewhat brow-beaten tone, as if she and her accomplices John Parish, Mick Harvey and Jean-Marc Butty are deliberately trying not to be too testosterously rock'n'roll in their approach. In one sense, this acts as a counterbalance to the violence of the subject-matter; in a wider sense, though, it's a distinctly post-war tone, the diffident, regretful sound remaining when a generation of young men has been wiped out in some Great War. When Harvey elsewhere sings of "unburied ghosts hanging in the wire", it's delivered in faint, etiolated manner over a lonely throb, a ghost of a song in tribute to the dead.

Even the fuller arrangements seem to have had the life beaten out of them: the deflated sax and trombone accompanying the bloody advances on hilltop, beach and ridge in "All and Everyone" are like cows lowing at the slaughter, while nothing conjures up the "grey, damp filthiness of ages" of our national decline quite as accurately as the wheezing sax and weedy guitar in "The Last Living Rose", a tattered flag raised over a muddy wasteland.

There are hints and echoes of other cultural modes in some songs. "On Battleship Hill", in which the scent of thyme on a former battlefield confirms the ultimate victory of "cruel nature", sounds like a Western theme song, while "The Glorious Land", with its complaints at how the land is ploughed by tanks and marching feet, and its fruit is orphaned children, could be a partisan anthem from Vietnam or Palestine or any comparable resistance movement. And with its thrumming autoharp, "The Colour of the Earth", a song about Anzac troops at Gallipoli on which Mick Harvey aptly shares lead vocals, has the ageless simplicity of an old folk song from the dominions. Coming right at the album's end, it's a sharp reminder that our military heritage is not ours alone, but an export whose grim repercussions are felt across the world.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... ml#Scene_1

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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

This is the Daily Express review in its entirety, which makes you wonder if the reviewer actually bothered to listen, and whether they got paid for doing this job:

PJ Harvey: Let England Shake (Island)

You might not be able to pick her out of a police line-up but there’s no lack of respect for English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey.

This album moves away from her usual sound but let’s just say it’s not our bag.

Daily Mirror and Daily Express are tabloid "newspapers", not exactly known for journalistic integrity - comforting to know LES 'isn't their bag'.

Fuck Him!
Anyone who has a thing bad to say about this album can take a hike!

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that Daily Express review is funny!
surpisingly she got a great review from the Mirror though..


CD OF THE WEEK

In the 19 years since her career began, Polly Jean Harvey's music has been consistently changing, consistently fascinating.

She's moved from the raw punk blues of Rid Of Me to the brooding electronics of Is This Desire? She's racked up Grammy and Brit nominations and won the 2000 Mercury Prize for the plush melodic rock of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea.

The poised piano ballads of her last solo album, White Chalk, confirmed an artist unwilling to trade on a formula, tread water or stagnate.

And so it continues. With this, her eighth album (her 10th if you include two collaborations with longtime associate John Parish), PJ signals another characteristic change of direction.

Let England Shake is a startlingly dark yet musically delicate meditation on the legacy of war and Empire from a foot soldier's perspective.

Unmentioned by name, but ever present in the imagery, is the bloody trench warfare of the First World War, in particular the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. In that tragic sector of the conflict, Britain was allied to Australia, and Harvey's chief collaborator here (alongside Parish) is one-time Bad Seed and Birthday Party member Mick Harvey (no relation), himself an Aussie.


Coloured with mellotron, horns, xylophone and funereal military percussion, the sound of this album is lonesome and skittish, giving an urgency to the innocence of Harvey's fraught wispy vocal.

Songs rooted in folk and battlefield ballads borrow from the unlikeliest places. She tellingly quotes Eddie Cochran on The Words That Maketh Murder "what if I take my problem to the United Nations?", and samples Niney's reggae classic Blood And Fire on the awesome Written On The Forehead. It is a brave and bold album, unlike anything you'll hear all year.

For all the artful junkshop-in-calico musical dressing it's no easy ride, the lyrical focus is often on ghastly violence. Bodies fall like "lumps of meat", a no man's land is populated by "unburied ghosts".

Harvey is a poetically unnerving operator. She uses past resources to shape a piece of work that is bitingly contemporary.

At 41, she's still one of the most significant forces of her generation.


http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/201 ... -22915134/

John Doran , February 11th, 2011 06:42

No se puede... Yo lo vi... One cannot look... I have seen it...

The Spanish painter Francisco Goya was in an ideal position to comment on The Peninsula War of 1804 - 1808. As his country stood on the brink of becoming overwhelmed by Napoleon’s armies, the elderly painter was himself becoming overwhelmed by madness and disease. His pictures from this period (The Disasters Of War) are perhaps the most potent pieces of war art the world has ever seen. One of these plates, Great Deeds! Against The Dead! shows severed body parts hanging obscenely from the branches of a tree.

It is no coincidence that ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’ from Polly Harvey’s latest album Let England Shake, opens with the lines: “I’ve seen and done things that 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.” This superior statement of protest is weirdly part ‘Surfin’ Bird’, part English folk song, part reverb-stunned Cocteau Twins and part colliery marching brass band. The West Country icon delivers her ice-cold lines with a compellingly child-like delivery suggesting that, like Goya, she needs to distance herself from the horror... she cannot, as an adult, look directly at it. It is this singular vocal delivery that carries the barbed lyrics of the entire album. She told a reporter from her local paper, the Bridport News: “I couldn't sing [the songs] in a rich strong mature voice without it sounding completely wrong. So I had to slowly find the voice, and this voice started to develop, almost taking on the role of a narrator."



At the end of the track she has long time collaborator John Parish sing, "What if I take my problems to the United Nations?" (as in Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summer Time Blues’). It provides a moment of almost hilarious catharsis and reveals exactly how little hope she has that things are going to get better any time soon. We're a bloodthirsty, territorial race of mammals, and there ain’t no cure, right?



Great Deeds! Against The Dead! was cast as a bronze piece by contemporary artists Jake and Dinos Chapman in 1997 for the Sensation exhibition. The brothers stand now as they did then, head and shoulders above most of their contemporaries and in this Goya referencing work they have made some of the most emotionally engaging modern war art since Picasso’s Geurnica. Harvey’s words reverberate with the very same morbidity: “Flies swarming everyone/ death lingering, stunk/ over the whole summit peak/ flesh quivering in the heat.” Those needing more persuading should watch the video for John Parish and Harvey’s ‘Black Hearted Love’ from 2009; it was, of course, directed by the Chapman Brothers. (Again, it comes as little surprise to discover that Seamus Murphy, the director of the sublime promo for ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’ and the other 11 short films made to accompany tracks from the album, was himself chosen by Harvey because of his unique skill as a war photographer. His modus operandi is to choose seemingly innocuous subjects that don’t stare directly at the carnage.)

At no point on this stunning album is Harvey in the thick of the action, she appears in the direct aftermath, and often one degree removed from the fighting entirely. The Guardian (and occasional Quietus) writer Dorian Lynsky was talking about the album on the ILX message board recently when, as is his wont, he put it more succinctly than me by saying he had a theory that “the war lyrics here are more about the history of responding to war in visual art, folksong, etc than about the event itself”. I think he is right but the chief irony here is that several of the songs here would sit comfortably in his excellent study of popular protest songs, 33 Revolutions Per Minute.



All across Let England Shake there are samples and inclusions from other songs and accordingly they are scattered almost carelessly, existing to draw your attention elsewhere. (Admittedly, while some of the samples on the record become part of the tapestry of the whole on successive listens, this does not happen to the Regimental March bugle call by HM Irish Guards that stands out like a sore thumb on ‘The Glorious Land’ to the extent that the entire Quietus team was convinced it was a whimsical anti-pirating ident until they heard a finished copy.) If this is art about art then it exists as part of a grand tradition: the mutilated and limbless body hanging from the tree’s branches in Great Deeds! Against The Dead! was almost certainly sketched by Goya from the Belvedere Torso, a 3,000 year old damaged statue by an unknown Athenian sculptor that is in all likelihood itself a copy of a 4,000 year old statue...

Much has been made of how different Let England Shake is to White Chalk, her last solo album proper. Of course, musically they don't sound anything alike, this being full of simple, organic folk melody, the former is full of calcified and threatening ambience. But neither is this the return of Polly the Mercury Prize winning rock star of Stories From The City Stories From The Sea. Her instrument of choice here is not the relatively unfamiliar upright piano but the relatively easy to sling on Autoharp and the not-taken-out-of-its-case-since-the-1980s saxophone - two instruments she’s never recorded with before. So both albums have benefited from sonic excitement strategies that do not allow any of the music to become too slick or easy to process. The listener is constantly unsettled by small jagged details, everyone involved is slightly uneasy: PJH, her trusty band of fellow musicians John Parish, Mick Harvey, Jean-Marc Butty and the listener are left fractionally outside their comfort zone.



Her sonic palate is simple but used to myriad effect. On ‘All And Everyone’ the Autoharp is fed through masses of reverb until it feels as if it has taken on a physical shape, like a haze of gunpowder smoke rolling across a battlefield. It is as if the cavernous post shoegaze guitars are tracing out death on the battlefield as a liminal zone between this world and the next. It feels as if death has made a physical foothold on the battlefield: “death's anchorage”. But on top of this Harvey's words hang in the air like pink mist after mortar carnage. Her singing is pastoral and dignified but ultimately distressing - almost in the style of a war poet - and reflects how the natural order is inverted by conflict, the landscape becoming a Hell on Earth: “Death hung in the smoke and clung/ to 400 acres of useless beachfront/ A bank of red earth, dripping down death.

”But at all times Harvey remains distant from the action always by one degree of separation. This ‘she do the police in different voices’ is nothing new for her, but it’s only now perhaps that people will stop digging for autobiographical nuggets in her lyrics because, well, she clearly isn’t a young infantryman who got blown apart at Gallipoli. As has been pointed out, the references to the fate of young ANZAC, British and French troops during the campaign are important and sure, ‘All And Everyone’, ‘On Battleship Hill’ and ‘The Colour Of The Earth’ are ostensibly about these massacres. However the first and last of these are specifically inspired by the oral histories of soldiers recorded in Maurice Shadbolt’s Voices Of Gallipolit. Yet again, this is appears to be art about art. Perhaps this is not so much a collection of anti-war songs as a call to arms for would be war photographers, writers, painters and filmmakers.

Of course this is an album that gives up its secrets slowly, like a field in Flanders gradulally returning the bones of soldiers to the surface. The sample of ‘Blood And Fire’ by Niney The Observer dropped into ‘Written On The Forehead’ presumably makes the song a double reference to the Bible's Book Of Revelation. But dinars from which country (Iraq?) and why? What is the burning trench of oil? The blazing oil fields of the first Iraq war? The sleeve notes tell us that ‘The Glorious Land’ and ‘In The Dark Places’ are partially inspired by extracts from Russian Folk Lyrics. This is a book containing verse used by village “wailers” after someone has died and has an entire chapter relating to the lyrics of serving soldiers. There's such depth here that I’m still going to be puzzling over this album on a daily basis for many more months to come.

In 2007, Harvey lifted out of a mid-career plateau (as high as this was) with White Chalk and now with Let England Shake she has shown that not only is she is her generation’s pre-eminent songwriter but, amazingly, that she is also still in her ascendancy. 


http://thequietus.com/articles/05683-pj ... ake-review

_________________
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

The Daily Wail is outside of it's comfort zone (right wing propaganda) again I see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

Anxiously anticipating The Suns monosyllabic input.

On a brighter note I can't remember reading so many rave reviews for a new album

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http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=Polar1One

"With the guitar-driven urgency of her early records gone" - Here he hints that he basically wants a Rid of Me or Dry. And anything that isn't guitar based basically isn't woth listening to. I'm so sick of this mentality . White Chalk (going by technicality) was probably the best body of work that she's done yet. There's been substance in everything she's done, whether it actually "rocked" or not. And "Let England Shake" is no exception. This isn't exactly written from an objective point of view, therefore it could never be considered valid. A lazy review (can it even be called that?) by some ignorant fool stuck in the past. Same goes for that other tosser who wrote that review for the New Yorker (not going to even bother typing his name) Rant over!

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A big thankyou for that one, ethereal! :-) Look out - I'm off to look up the Zinoviev Letter affair and the pro-Mussolini/Hitler comments from way back...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter

Support for fascism under Rothermere

Lord Rothermere was a friend and supporter of both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which influenced the Mail's political stance towards them during the 1930s.[28][29] Rothermere's 1933 leader "Youth Triumphant" praised the new Nazi regime's accomplishments, and was subsequently used as propaganda by them.[30]

“ The minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing on Germany (1933). ”

—Lord Rothermere, publisher

-

'Rothermere and the Mail were also editorially sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.[31] Rothermere wrote an article entitled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" in January 1934, praising Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine".[32] This support ended after violence at a BUF rally in Kensington Olympia later that year.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail

For good measure, here's a favourite George Orwell essay of mine: Daily Mail; Churchill - who also supported the dropping of poison gas on Kurds, which was never carried out, fortunately - et al expressing support for Mussolini. They were worried about Bolshevism taking over Europe, so they liked Mussolini:

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/crimi ... sh/e_crime

See? I warned you. Sorry for going way, way off-topic!

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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

Polly Harvey has forged a career as the blacksmith of unhappiness, mostly her own and of a coruscatingly personal nature. Now, she has turned her attention to the world at large, and has noticed that a lot of it is at war. Her new album is soaked in bloodshed. Grim.

Less grim is the fact that Let England Shake approaches the status of a masterpiece. Polly has a marvellous voice and trusted producer Flood makes the most of those vocal chords. She occasionally encroaches upon Kate Bush territory - to wit On Battleship Hill - but mostly gives a robust account of her own self. In turning her gaze from inward to outward, Harvey has reinvented herself.

The keystone track on the record is England, which owes a debt to the Waterboys' Old England but is not as resonant. Far better are tunes like The Glorious Land and The Words That Maketh Murder, both of which transcend the irony/clumpingness of their titles. Fans of Patti Smith might become enthralled with All And Everyone. PJ Harvey wants us all to know that the world is not a very kind place. Her - mostly - lovely songs make it better.

PETE CLARK

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/art ... ht-eyes.do

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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

PJ Harvey's Let England Shake is an extraordinary album.
Rating: * * * * *

New photo too



Polly Jean Harvey’s extraordinary eighth album digs its claws in deep. It is a profound and serious work from a singer-songwriter at the height of her powers, a meditation on mankind’s apparently endless appetite for self-destruction, filtered through the Dorset native’s complex feelings of love, pride and also disappointment in her own country.

Harvey is probably best known for pitching into raw and bloody emotional terrain with fingernails-on-chalkboard intensity. On Let England Shake, with long time collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey, she has found a way to bring her often jarring musical instincts into one coherent place, setting off high, thin vocals against acoustic washes, electric scratches and rough hewn rhythms that evoke the ancient textures and mysteries (if not the sonic palette) of folk music.

The sound is criss-crossed with, almost literally, off beat intrusions, sometimes at odds with the underlying track, from Arabic ululations (England) to bugle reveille (The Glorious Land) to a sampled reggae band summoning blood and fire on the dark, despairing Written on the Forehead.

The simplicity and directness of Harvey’s three-piece band blending awkwardly with outside influences evokes a sense of the polymorphous and multicultural, a sound clash of the modern world.

Though her themes are universal in scope, Harvey’s carefully considered, poetic lyrics resonate with images of England and ideas of Englishness, so at times it feels like a love letter of loss and longing for a fading ideal. On The Last Living Rose, she declares “Goddam Europeans! Take me back to England”, but this is no John Major-like homily to cricket grounds and warm beer, but “the grey, damp filthiness of ages.”

This is an England lurching towards apocalypse, ruined by blindness to its own virtues, selling off its natural resources and sending its young men to die in foreign fields.

There is a lot of death on Let England Shake, soldiers falling “like lumps of meat”, rotting bodies left where they lie, from the killing fields of the First World War to the deserts of Iraq.

It’s not a barrel of laughs, then and there are no pop hits. But it is note perfect, considered and distilled to its essential parts by a great and ambitious artist who, contrary to the trajectory of too many rock careers, is getting better with time.

For all its despair at the cost of war, this is not a protest record, rather a consideration of our place in the greater scheme of things. The album is full of imagery of woods and field, “bitter branches” and “red earth”. On the haunting On Battleship Hill, no trace is left of the lives lost there, “the land returns to how it has always been”. In the end, merciless nature consumes all.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/musi ... -week.html

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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

Love the photo! The photos of this era seem so candid.

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