Let England Shake
In the wake of 2007’s spectral *White Chalk*, Polly Jean Harvey turned her songwriting focus outward. Dismayed by the direction of politics in her British homeland and around the world, she set to writing lyrics—fever-dreamish poems that used brutal imagery and borrowed lines from older music—that worked through her sadness and anger. Using three autoharps, each tuned to different, dissonant chord configurations, she transformed the verses into striking, sad songs. *Let England Shake* is an elegiac 21st-century reimagining of the protest album, an urgent call to end global cycles of war that hits harder because of its ghostly sonics. Harvey’s voice is the focal point of *Let England Shake*, although its timbre sharply contrasts with the shredded wailing that made her harsher ‘90s records so celebrated. On songs like the rain-spattered “The Glorious Land” and the swirling “Hanging on the Wire,” she’s in the upper reaches of her range, adding a pleading edge to her cutting observations; she hovers over the echoing chords of “On Battleship Hill” in an unnervingly beautiful way, heightening the horrors once committed on that site. “The Words That Maketh Murder,” meanwhile, accentuates its grimy images with bleating brass and a snippet of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” that simutaneously calls back to the post-World War II era’s seemingly endless promise and mourns the present. *Let England Shake* evokes the fog of war while puncturing it with potent reminders of its bloody reality.
The always-unpredictable singer-songwriter returns with a haunting and beautiful meditation on war that ranks with her finest records.
Like politics itself, political albums are too often preachy and shrill. In some ways, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake—an avowedly anti-war record—falls prey to the same pitfalls. But Shake’s transcendence lies in Harvey’s acceptance of the limitations of the political album, and the way she recombines protest-music…
Polly Jean Harvey has stoically and elegantly documented the days when the dancing has stopped and the bloom has fallen off the last living rose, and in the process has crafted an album that difficultly defines our troubled times while also offering hope…
PJ Harvey followed her ghostly collection of ballads, White Chalk, with Let England Shake, an album strikingly different from what came before it except in its Englishness.
With the very first words, “Let England shake/ weighed down with silent dead,” set against a cymbal laden, wind accompanied Autoharp backing; we are thrown straight into an atmospheric world of historical recollection and experience.
Both an excoriation and celebration of her home country, Let England Shake is as straightforward a concept as PJ Harvey has ever addressed on record.
Harvey’s big humanist statement is scatter shot with non specific socio-political proclamations constructed of character narratives which focus on external rather than internal conflicts.
Last year Polly Jean Harvey turned 41, prepared her eighth studio, Let England Shake -- and marked the tenth anniversary of 2000’s Stories from the City,...
<p>PJ Harvey's new album finds her at something of a creative peak, says <strong>Alexis Petridis</strong>. Plus: it's got tunes</p>