PJ Harvey - Let EnglandShake

Fri 8th Apr, 2011 in Music Reviews

Soldiers falling like lumps of meat, bloodied earth, swarming flies and death’s dogged presence are signposts that tell you Let England Shake isn’t going to be an easy listen. PJ Harvey’s latest album is a brutal but desperately human account of war – unflinching in its quest to pin back your eyelids and force you to acknowledge the horrific consequences of conflict.

It’s heavy-duty stuff, but PJ Harvey is mindful that a bit of hand holding is required. So she tempers the bleakness with droplets of nectar into her well of fetid water. The Last Living Rose may find her walking to the “music of drunken beatings” but the easy harmonies and sweetly accented notes are like a great big sugar-dipped soother to help those of a sensitive disposition.

The whole album is peppered with moments like this. Despite its preoccupation with violence, Harvey (along with long-standing cohorts John Parish and Mick Harvey ) often keeps the music on the other side of the dividing line. The title track is wonderfully curious in its buoyancy and pace. Harvey’s bitter assertion that “England’s dancing days are done” is handled with childlike, featherweight tones that make her sound unhinged and unencumbered by her protagonist’s journey to the “fountain of death”.

Let England Shake therefore bears little resemblance to 2007’s buttoned-up and austere White Chalk. The Glorious Land’s light-footed percussion sets Harvey loose to hitch up her vocal chords and skip up and down the song’s peaks and troughs. The Words that Maketh Murder abounds with jaunty handclaps and an inappropriately cheery trombone that’s totally oblivious to the bodies “blown and shot out beyond belief”. There’s even an opportunity for some satirical skewering as Harvey and co. highlight the wretched impotency of the United Nations by appropriating a line from Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues.

The displacement between words and music echoes a deep disconnect between man and country. Inhuman acts carried out at a nation’s behest make the notion of home difficult to reconcile. Harvey doesn’t tie the album to any one particular era or event so the pitiful yearning for a country past has universal resonance. England has an obvious reference point but it’s really the ultimate break-up song for anyone who’s lost total and utter faith in the place where they used to belong.

Although Harvey’s music sometimes acts as a buffer between the ears and the heart, there are points where she leaves the listener no place to hide. All and Everyone and The Colour of the Earth knit together sounds and subject matter in a tough union that can’t fail to unsettle. Funereal drums and steely guitars fall into step alongside “hearts that threatened to pop their boxes”; a simple tap of a tambourine sends Louis to his grave calling for his mother and a gentle swell of voices usher Death onto the battlefield.

Let England Shake is as important an album anyone will make this year, maybe this decade. PJ Harvey marries starkly affecting poetry with some of the finest song writing of her career. War is futile and tragic. Let England Shake is not.