PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Coming to terms with the fact that ‘Let England Shake’ is: a) a pastoral record about war, and b) perhaps the darkest album of Polly Jean Harvey’s career is no mean feat. The real challenge lies in how to interpret some of the lyrics, what to decipher when gazing over the sleevenotes, and what certain songs refer to. Like the very finest of albums, ‘Let England Shake’ encourages, no, persuades you into digging ever deeper and discovering the meaning behind an album that on first listen, overwhelms you on grounds of its sheer magnitude and wealth of ideas.

Certain things strike out from the off: the “soldiers fall like lumps of meat” lyric in ‘Words That Maketh Murder’, the reference to the ANZAC battles and Harvey’s child-like, near-shrieking vocals, to name but a few. From there, you’re asked to move from “lumps of meat” to find words of a similarly haunting disposition. You eventually find yourself seeing through the friendly piano chimes of ‘Hanging In The Wire’ and progressing from its dark title, discovering lines both distinct and distressing; “a smashed-up wasteground”, corpses lying motionless in barbed wire, as their “‘limbs point upwards”… And so on.

’Let England Shake’ isn’t a grower in the sense that the songs eventually push themselves upwards and the record clicks - in actual fact, the songs are immediate, embedding themselves in your head from the very start. Instead, the album grows because you force it to: You enter a process of discovery, appreciating every word Harvey utters, every terrible scene she describes. It becomes something of a hobby - a period of research, even.

This is a record of incredible depth; to such an extent that you need months of immersion in order to gather scattered ideas into one concise line-of-thought. After weeks with this album however, the following becomes clear: Polly and Mick Harvey, John Parish, Flood, have challenged themselves into making an album of notable difference to everything released throughout PJ Harvey’s illustrious, forever-changing career. This is nothing like a minimal, exposed and challenging solo work (‘White Chalk’) or a kaleidoscopic, stadium-ready breakthrough (‘Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’). Harvey is one of few remaining artists who, within a thick collection of works, has always thought outside of the box, using new instruments or recording techniques as a means of providing something new and exciting. Out of contemporary British acts, I can only think of Radiohead and Portishead as names that can sit aside Harvey in maintaining a forward-thinking ethos. And out of all of Harvey’s records, this might be her most challenging and most rewarding.

Use of an autoharp, insertion of world music samples, a musical adaptation of Russian folk literature: all of these things are new to both Harvey and the listener. The songs themselves are relatively simple: ‘The Glorious Land’ is a bouncing, melancholic offering, made up of no more than five, six chords. ‘On Battleship Hill’ could even be mistaken for John Parish’s work with Eels; so soothing is its opening minute of light piano and guitar. Of course, eventually, the latter eventually morphs into a dramatic, deeply-wounded account of warfare and the former includes the striking inclusion of a HM Irish Guards bugle call. The complexities of these songs are far from obvious; that’s why delving into the record’s meaning is such a rewarding experience. A pleasant record reveals itself as a staggering work.

It’s difficult to judge whether ‘Let England Shake’ is a perfect record because like much of Harvey’s work, it’s unlike anything we’ve really heard before. Perhaps as the dust settles on the bloody battlefields, we’ll forget about it, move on to anticipating the talent’s next challenging album. Or - as the likelier scenario of the two - we’ll fall more and more head first into its darkness, its bedraggled spirit and its significance as one of the more meaningful records of the last decade.