8,8 DA PITCHFORK PER PJ HARVEY

PJ Harvey
Let England Shake
[Island Def Jam; 2011]

8.8
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“The West’s asleep,” PJ Harvey declares on the first line of her new album, Let England Shake, before spending the next 40 minutes aiming to shame, frighten, and agitate it into action. When Polly Jean Harvey burst into the public consciousness in the early 90s, her gravely voice, outsized personality, and often disturbing lyrics gave the alt-rock world a crucial shot of excitement. That early work is still among the most raw and real guitar music to emerge from the past few decades, so no surprise, it’s a version of PJ Harvey a lot of people still miss. But if you’ve paid attention to her in the years since, the one thing you can expect is that she won’t repeat herself.

On Let England Shake, Harvey is not often upfront or forceful; her lyrics, though, are as disturbing as ever. Here, she paints vivid portraits of war, and her sharp focus on the up-close, hand-to-hand devastation of World War I– depicting “soldiers falling like lumps of meat”– provides a fitting setting for today’s battlegrounds. From the Zombies to the Pogues, artists have often gravitated to the confused, massive loss of life of the Great War. If it doesn’t resonate as much in America as it does in Europe– and it doesn’t– that’s more our fortune than our shame.

The Great War remains a rich and resonant subject for art because it briefly caused the world to step back, aghast and afraid to look at what it had done. The collective trauma of World War I did indeed shake England, specifically, out of the end of its imperialistic Victorian stupor. The rest of the world gasped as well: WWI hastened the Russian Revolution, coaxed the U.S. into isolationism and a flirtation with pacifism, and set the tone for a shunned Germany to embrace the Third Reich. Culturally, the result was modernism, dadaism, and surrealism continuing to overtake the giddiness of la belle époque; geopolitically, it redrew European borders, creating roughly a dozen new nations; diplomatically, the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, was meant to prevent war, at least on this scale, from ever happening again.

On “The Words That Maketh Murder”, Harvey blackly and comically shakes her head at those post-WWI diplomatic hopes. After spinning tales lamenting what a soldier has seen and done, she and her cohorts– frequent collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey– break into the jaunty closing refrain from “Summertime Blues”: “What if I take my problems to the United Nations?” It’s a hilariously depressing coda; her song’s character has experienced the unimaginable and is looking to an international peacekeeping body for help.

Throughout the record, Harvey sings in her higher register, as she often did on the underrated White Chalk, granting her some detachment from her surroundings. Instead of owning the spotlight outright, as she did in the 90s, she floats above and beside it; it’s a neat trick that forces listeners to crawl closer to her words, allowing them to slowly come into focus. The textural and tonal qualities of her voice are made malleable, a scalpel wielded with precision rather than a sword. On the whole, she carries distant echoes of her peers and successors– Joanna Newsom, Björk, Kate Bush– while remaining clearly and identifiably herself.

Harvey does this musically too, incorporating traces of English folk, early rock, reverbed dream-pop, and disparate familiar melodies (as well as “Summertime Blues,” she appropriates Niney the Observer’s apocalyptic “Blood and Fire” on the one directly Iraq-related song here, “Written on the Forehead”, plus a close approximation of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” that originally played a larger role on the record) as a foundation. With autoharp, zither, saxophone, and other new instruments added to her palette, Harvey crucially crafts sturdy, earwormy melodies. If you didn’t listen to the words, the record would scan as beautiful, even docile or tame. Harvey forces you to locate the real world behind a pleasantly hazy foreground.

Even considering all of the horror on display, this is her most straightforward and easy to embrace album in a decade. Along with “The Words That Maketh Murder”, the bouncing title track, the radio rock of “The Last Living Rose”, and “Written on the Forehead” would all make excellent singles. They’ll all get a chance, so to speak: Harvey commissioned war photographer Seamus Murphy to craft videos for each of the record’s dozen tracks. (Three of them have already been released: “Let England Shake”, “The Words That Maketh Murder”, and “The Last Living Rose”.) As much of a piece as this record is, its songs also work in their own contexts, and despite using a limited number of players and instruments, Harvey and co. locate a wide range of approaches to their central subject; alongside the singles, those include the rousing folk-rock of “Bitter Branches”, the delicate “Hanging in the Wire”, and the acoustic “England”.

Even a cursory glance at the album– its title, song titles, lyrics– marks this as a very English record. Its pastoralism befits Harvey’s West Country background and recording setting (as well as the fields in Europe in which most of WWI was fought, and where most of the dead are now laid to rest). But it’s less about the experience of one nation with war, so much as one people. That those people are English is Harvey soaking her music in her own surroundings and experiences. Swap out the place names with others, though, and the message remains the same. It’s universal and it’s necessary– and it’s powerfully and clearly stated. That it’s also a joy to hear is perhaps the most confounding juxtaposition of all, turning a record you’ll respect into one you’ll also love.