Review: PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (2011) [Vagrant/Island] // Grade: A+
PJ Harvey knows when to let a good thing go. The grit of Dry and Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love’s off-balance electronics, the hulking ballads of Uh Huh Her—all gone by the wayside just before expiration, sacrifices to the constant pursuit of what’s new and next. It hasn’t always worked—argue amongst yourselves whether aforementioned Uh Huh Her was vision or travesty—but this time, the search landed Ms. Polly Jean at one of her most epic and overwhelmingly perfect albums to date. And though the switch-up is partially thanks to an obsession with auto-harp and squealing upper registers, the real newness comes from her changing the one thing that’s always been constant: PJ Harvey, god love her, stopped writing about herself.
A far cry from the navel-gazing of yore—even 2007’s austere White Chalk nested so far inward—Let England Shake is a political exercise, and an external one at that: PJ’s beloved and broken England, this mother-country of gardens and mountainous grey, memories of Gallipoli and faraway soldiers still “blown and shot out beyond belief,” the Thames “glistening like gold/hastily sold for nothing.” Harvey channels a journalist’s precision here, highlighting the very human disconnect between national love and the horrors of war with Pinter’s (and, for that matter, Orwell’s) manic focus on descriptive truth. Think Kate Bush’s best war songs, all the deadly emotion of them, sans poetic flora. War correspondence: meet the auto-harp.
But England is a much weirder record than the lyrics have you believe. Beneath its politics and deep-aqua atmosphere (so much of the music feels like that river, glistening) is a heap of sonic elements begging your confusion; things that shouldn’t fit together, that don’t fit together, go suddenly grand and magical under PJ’s care. The curious strumming of the “Constantinople” chord structure in “Let England Shake.” “Words that Maketh Murder” with its Paul Cavanaugh Trio backing vocals and the catchy coda (“What if I take my problems to the United Nations?”) all but directly ripping “Summertime Blues.” The middle-eastern wail-loops on “England”. And those horns, constantly with the horns, the ever-present hum of them never quite taking England to the cutesy, referential place they might with anyone else. It’s a cluster the way only PJ Harvey do: beautiful and strange as fuck in equal measure. Go ahead and pine for her earlier edge, those thrums of synth, the more-recent piano-led melodies—hell, even pine for the internalizing of her previous lyrics, way back when poetry trumped politics, and personal observation meant more than national—but there’s no denying the power of this album. You don’t hear songs like “Words That Maketh Murder” or “The Last Living Rose” and walked away unscathed; you just don’t. And every track on Let England Shake is more impactful than the last. PJ Harvey knows when to let a good thing go. Because new things like this? Worth the sacrifice.
