PJ Harvey dazzled me with her first few albums, but after To Bring You My Love, she got lost in the wilderness of my post-graduate years. Ever watchful for my beloved “top-secret” bands becoming sell-outs (which was just successful, by my selfish standards), I felt like Harvey lost her edge somehow. Her later albums were watery versions of the concentrated guitar madness of her initial work, the lyrics quieter and more ponderous.
But as I’ve listened to PJ Harvey’s latest album, Let England Shake, I started considering a different possibility: Maybe what she discovered in her own musical process is that she didn’t need that gnashing, shrill sound and those tortured lyrics anymore. What she needed was to move out and beyond. And now there’s Let England Shake, a series of songs about war and the bloodstained legacy of her home country.
Making art about historic events you have no connection to is always a risky endeavor. It could come off as trite, or it could be mesmerizing. And I guess this album a little bit of both for me.
So though I may miss the drag-queeny Sheela-na-Gig I fell in love with, the musician is older, armed with her autoharp and looking outward (and backward) at her country. It’s unreasonable to expect her to stay dipped in amber–always angry, always turned up.
All expectations aside, Let England Shake is interesting, though some songs are much stronger, while others feel like an afterthought. Much of it plays like a broken music box in a half-remembered dream–all the more compelling because its sound is hard to pin down.
England and Written on the Forehead have a lovely haunted quality to them, and others, like The Words That Maketh Murder, are anchored in memorable melodies. And there are some lyrics that I really love, like on The Last Living Rose:
Take me back to beautiful England
And the grey, damp filthiness of ages
And battered books and
Fog rolling down behind the mountains
On the graveyards and dead sea captains
Let me walk through the stinkin’ alleys
To the music of drunken beings
In the end, I wanted there to be more blood and bone to this album than there was. But as a Harvey devotee, who can still listen to Dry and marvel at its sound, my bar is set a bit high.
