PJ Harvey: Let England Shake, CD of the week

An extraordinary album of deep emotion.

PJ Harvey

Let England Shake

Island, £13.99

Polly Jean Harvey’s extraordinary eighth album digs its claws in deep. It is a profound and serious work from a singer-songwriter at the height of her powers, a meditation on mankind’s apparently endless appetite for self-destruction, filtered through the Dorset native’s complex feelings of love, pride and also disappointment in her own country.

Harvey is probably best known for pitching into raw and bloody emotional terrain with fingernails-on-chalkboard intensity. On Let England Shake, with long time collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey, she has found a way to bring her often jarring musical instincts into one coherent place, setting off high, thin vocals against acoustic washes, electric scratches and rough hewn rhythms that evoke the ancient textures and mysteries (if not the sonic palette) of folk music.

The sound is criss-crossed with, almost literally, off beat intrusions, sometimes at odds with the underlying track, from Arabic ululations (England) to bugle reveille (The Glorious Land) to a sampled reggae band summoning blood and fire on the dark, despairing Written on the Forehead.

The simplicity and directness of Harvey’s three-piece band blending awkwardly with outside influences evokes a sense of the polymorphous and multicultural, a sound clash of the modern world.

Though her themes are universal in scope, Harvey’s carefully considered, poetic lyrics resonate with images of England and ideas of Englishness, so at times it feels like a love letter of loss and longing for a fading ideal. On The Last Living Rose, she declares “Goddam Europeans! Take me back to England”, but this is no John Major-like homily to cricket grounds and warm beer, but “the grey, damp filthiness of ages.”

This is an England lurching towards apocalypse, ruined by blindness to its own virtues, selling off its natural resources and sending its young men to die in foreign fields.

There is a lot of death on Let England Shake, soldiers falling “like lumps of meat”, rotting bodies left where they lie, from the killing fields of the First World War to the deserts of Iraq.

It’s not a barrel of laughs, then and there are no pop hits. But it is note perfect, considered and distilled to its essential parts by a great and ambitious artist who, contrary to the trajectory of too many rock careers, is getting better with time.

For all its despair at the cost of war, this is not a protest record, rather a consideration of our place in the greater scheme of things. The album is full of imagery of woods and field, “bitter branches” and “red earth”. On the haunting On Battleship Hill, no trace is left of the lives lost there, “the land returns to how it has always been”. In the end, merciless nature consumes all.