Thursday, February 10th 2011

Reviews:  PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey’s Bittersweet Nationalism

By Fernando Scoczynski Filho

History has proven that PJ Harvey refuses to repeat herself, resulting in an outstandingly wide-ranging and varied career. After 2007′s White Chalk‘s piano-driven minimalism confused a large part of her audience, four years later, Ms. Harvey’s eighth LP, Let England Shake, leaves us in awe once more (stream the full album here).

The title track opener makes it immediately clear that the moderate instrumentation from White Chalk was a feature exclusive to that album. Her signature eerie vocals still prevail, only this time they’re accompanied by much fuller arrangements. The autoharp, an instrument that Harvey has used extensively on her solo live set, appears on most of Let England Shake, and has an unusually rich sound that’s not quite like a guitar, but in this case acts as a greatly appropriate replacement of one.

In addition, there’s the common presence of the piano, and the occasional appearance of a saxophone and a trombone. It can be an odd pastiche of noises at times, but one that clearly had a lot of thought put into, and doesn’t feel thrown together. An example of this appears on Written On The Forehead, which samples Niney the Observer’s Blood and Fire, a reggae song with a repeated refrain (“Let it burn”) that somehow manages to fit just right.

With a surprisingly pop-oriented rhythm section, the overall tone of the album could nearly be mistaken for a cheery one. That’s not to say anyone should expect the radio-friendly melodies of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, as the ones within Let England Shake are much more eccentric and eclectic, but there’s a comparison to be drawn in the way that both albums flow easily. A few moments flirt with a much greater weight, such as on Bitter Branches, where the tension builds up as if the band is about to branch out into a full-on rock song, but stays within boundaries of the atmosphere of the album.

For the first time in Polly Jean’s career, she departs from standard personal lyricism, instead focusing a narrative design around the country of her birth. It’s both about the history of England and the narrator’s conflicted relation to its rotting core, a fit of bittersweet nationalism. On The Last Living Rose she sings wistfully about “the Thames River, glistening like gold / Hastily sold for nothing,” and on England she sums things up nicely: “The country that I love / England, you leave a taste / A bitter one.”

Of course, the English motive is present throughout the entire album, but its comprehension isn’t necessary to fully enjoy the songs, nor will it be detrimental in case the lyrics are ignored. Even if the listener couldn’t care less about what historical facts influenced the brilliantly catchy The Words That Maketh Murder, when PJ sings ”I have seen and done things I want to forget / Soldiers fell like lumps of meat / Blown and shot-out beyond belief,” it only makes the experience even better.

Digging deeper into the message of each song reveals a more profound meaning to the record. Centerpiece track All And Everyone, clocking in at almost six minutes, delivers such contemplatives as “Death was in the staring sun / Fixing its eyes on everyone“. The lyric is epic in its own right, but it also happens to narrate the bloody battle of Gallipoli in the early 20th century, where nearly half a million people died.

Let England Shake lies somewhere on the middle of the accessibility road for PJ’s body of work. Her earlier material was immediately easier to pick up, but she’s also done far more unapproachable records (especially considering the ones she co-wrote with John Parish). The first listen is certainly a weird one, but also one that immediately shows the remarkably easy flow of the album. It doesn’t demand great attention, but a superficial analysis won’t reveal just how dense these cuts are, as more layers in the sound are revealed with repeated listens.

Even if you strip the album of its concept and significance, the music stands tall on its own. PJ Harvey’s creative spark on Let England Shake is the brightest it’s been in many years, producing a set of songs that courageously defy her previous experimentations with rock, while simultaneously sounding better every time she tries something new. It’s easy to start losing faith in any artist upon releasing his/her 8th LP, but Ms. Harvey has once again laid waste to our pre-conceived notions.