Deputy Mayor of New York City, Howard Wolfson's - yes, really - best album of the year:
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Howard’s Top Albums of the Year
1. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
PJ Harvey — Let England Shake
“We have,” poet Rupert Brooke wrote on the eve of World War One 98 years ago, “come into our heritage.”
That this heritage is the subject of the year’s best album, “Let England Shake,” book, “To End All Wars”, and high profile movie and play, “War Horse”, says something important about the moment we find ourselves in.
Alan Hollinghursts, who published a lyrical account based on Brooke’s life (and afterlife) this year, explained plainly “I’m preoccupied, as everyone is, by the First World War.”
This is not, however, the celebration of the Greatest Generation and The Good War which we observed at the fiftieth anniversary of World War II — rather it is a frightening sense that our own situation looks more like the catastrophic First World War and its disasterous aftermath.
For some, World War One is a metaphor for the Iraq War — both wars, critics argue, tragically unnecessary, both conflicts challenging nearly every assumption decision makers made at the onset of fighting.
For others, there is a poignant echo in the last glorious sun dappled summer of 1914, before the lights went out all over Europe, and our own recent economic boom and bust.
Harvey stepped into this discussion with a jolt. The release of “Let England Shake” was a major event in the U.K. — Harvey sang about the Emperor’s Clothes for both Gordon Brown
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It’s a complex work, setting the horrors of war to the sound of charging bugles. Like Brooke’s famous poem, the album is rooted in English soil and the battlefields across the Channel consecrated by English blood. Recorded in a Dorset church, it’s the sound of Albion — brass and autoharp give the music a timeless, classical feel.
Harvey paints a desolate landscape strewn with corpses — “death was all and everyone,” and when soldiers depart the charnel house to return home they can not leave the battlefield behind.
Harvey’s narrator begins “The Words that Maketh Murder” with a veteran’s lament: “I’ve seen and done things I want to forget.” The unforgettable follows: a recitation of arms and legs in trees and flies swarming the dead. The song ends by repeatedly invoking Eddie Cochran’s 1958 smash “Summertime Blues”: “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?” Fifty years later we know there will be little relief found there.
