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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 6:28 am 
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Blackie wrote:
I do wonder if she has lost the ability to sing as powerfully in a lower register, or if it's moreso a choice to not use a deeper voice anymore. What do others think?


Having been at Field Day and heard her rendering of To Bring You My Love which was incredibly powerful in a lower register, I rather interpret some of the changes as becoming more confident in a range of other voices - high registers, falsetto, light voice etc.

Personally, i am finding the journey with Polly's musical changes and turns compelling. Her commitment to using her artistry (both musically and poetically) to highlight real world lives and issues has been a welcome and at times challenging development from her long history of great story telling. The current band-based shows are consistently high quality - both in terms of her performances and the musicality of the band - from what I have seen both live and on film/audio.

I look forward to the ongoing journey!


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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 8:40 am 
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Blackie wrote:
I do wonder if she has lost the ability to sing as powerfully in a lower register, or if it's moreso a choice to not use a deeper voice anymore. What do others think?


The recent live versions of To Bring You My Love seem pretty powerful to me.


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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 7:39 pm 
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.


Last edited by Blackie on Sat Apr 18, 2020 6:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 10:02 pm 
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I do not like the new album or most of the last one. I don't like the way she sings these days or the lyrics. Oh well. :down:
I also lost a lot of respect for her when I saw she is on Instagram. What's next, is she going to tweet? :sick:


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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 10:28 pm 
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protocols wrote:
I do not like the new album or most of the last one. I don't like the way she sings these days or the lyrics. Oh well. :down:
I also lost a lot of respect for her when I saw she is on Instagram. What's next, is she going to tweet? :sick:

It's already happening...https://twitter.com/PJHarveyUK

_________________
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelqPcoaAB8"


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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 10:31 pm 
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protocols wrote:
I do not like the new album or most of the last one. I don't like the way she sings these days or the lyrics. Oh well. :down:
I also lost a lot of respect for her when I saw she is on Instagram. What's next, is she going to tweet? :sick:


its run by her management .. get a fkin grip


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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 11:03 pm 
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Is her management taking selfies? :eyeroll:


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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 11:53 pm 
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There's a new road currently opening for her, something more soulful, a deeper music from within, with sorrow and hope of the same time : it is almost gospel by essence, she must enjoy Porgy and Bess :). The songs of THSDP have evolved live due to this rich brass section which brilliantly sounds like a sleazy drunken Louisiana brass band. The American singers add a soulful vibe to the music, something almost religious, it is almost per moments an ode to Louis Armstrong. Her high register, that she has started with Nina in Exctasy, is sometimes a bit frustrating. LES was an interesting powerful album but I wasn't interested by its live tour, a lot of the tracks didn't breathe for me. This year, the songs take a new dimension. She is more feline on stage, her voice is more subtle. This is an uplifting period, it has been a blast to record all these live webcasts and see the band getting more and more confident night after night. The theatrical show with minimalist light could have been a trap with a kind of expressionist cinema atmosphere but it is counterbalanced by the warmth of the band and the way she acts on stage. She is not the ice queen anymore, distant and frozen that she was in 2011 on stage, she now attacks the scene and moves like a panther.

I also like the kind of experimental jazz on WFTM with the small trumpet solo, it is not so far from what Bowie did on certain tracks of Black Star.
This tour and the new songs on stage are a peak in entertainment.


Last edited by arnovice on Sun Jul 17, 2016 12:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 11:58 pm 
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Its not like she's giving us duck lips and posting her lunch or addressing her haters. I agree, get a grip. I personally like her Instagram, she doesnt even say anything. Its likely just her management posting pics that she has approved. As for Selfies, the entire booklet of Uh Huh Her was "selfies".

Also, I cant wait to see her next month in LA! Will be my first time seeing her in person. From the videos, these look like her strongest performances since the 90's! Her voice is in top form, and she moves around very confidently. I hope she performs Guilty, its quickly become a favorite.


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PostPosted: Sat Jul 16, 2016 7:51 am 
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protocols wrote:
Is her management taking selfies? :eyeroll:

Those are self-portraits, and she does them almost every day since the early 90s (she was talking about that in "Uh Huh Her" documentary from tour DVD). I think she hands "the approved ones" to her staff to post it on there.


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PostPosted: Tue Jul 19, 2016 6:21 pm 
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An element in my affection for PJ is the sense of having changed along with her over the course of a quarter-century, and in some of the same ways. Part of this is about getting a bit milder as one gets older, and I notice that when I listen to some of the music which meant a lot to me when I was 20 what I experience is not the emotion I felt then, but the memory of that emotion. Not long ago, though, I re-listened to Polly’s earlier albums, wondering how I’d feel about the music – and if anything am more sensitive to the savagery and violence than I was in the past. It seems heightened by the awareness of what she’s done since.

bruise wrote:
... each new sound standing as the objective correlative of the whole body of work ...


That puts it brilliantly: after so long, and so much change, everything Polly does seems to me to be contained in everything else. Part of the reason, for instance, that I find that performance of ‘I Wonder as I Wander’ in Berlin so moving is that its purity and serenity emerge from the same person as all that jaggedness and violence. I like that.

And those earlier recordings are still there, but I imagine that as a performer PJ would find it hard to keep producing new work that made use of the same emotions without burlesquing herself; a performed song is already at several removes from the emotion that inspires it, and the further away you get from the emotional experience the less possible it is to pull the trick off (funnily enough the Thought for the Day Rowan Williams did as part of PJ’s act of assault-and-battery on the Today programme in 2014 touched on this idea, I wonder how that came about). Even the older pieces she’s performing at the moment aren’t being performed in the same way as they were twenty-odd years ago.

Of course she can only do what she wants to do and not what anyone else would prefer, although the ‘selfishness’ of that is balanced by the clear sense of vocation she has, of serving something whose origins somehow lie beyond her. I think this is what a lot of creative people feel: you seem to ‘discover’ work rather than make it, although actually battering it out in a usable form takes a lot of graft. That applies to individual pieces of work, though Polly has said in the past that she feels that about her trajectory as a whole, too.

As for Instagram: I wonder whether it’s part of the same interrogation of the idea of observing and being observed as the residency at Somerset House, and Hope VI itself. That showed how banal recording an album really is, and the Instagram account shows how banal touring it is. Both promise a kind of intimacy and in fact don’t reveal very much at all. Apart from the fact that she wears specs to read!


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PostPosted: Sat Jul 30, 2016 11:02 pm 
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I do think she's up a bit of a blind alley at the moment. She is involved or she is nothing, & using a deliberate distancing singing style does not work.
I've just listened to Somebody's down, somebody's name; by referencing a personally witnessed single event, real or imagined, she gets at the horror of what is everyday reality for some people. In this instance it may be a suicide, but the feeling is general - it could be someone blown to pieces, or summarily shot, or drowning. It makes you feel powerless in the face of something brutal, something you cannot stop despite everything inside you screaming for it to stop. For me, this works, this moves me, this communicates a common humanity far more than her recent output.

And getting older doesn't mean you get less passionate - listen to this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDbsDPEcehw

Vaughan Williams was 76 when he wrote it. Incredible.


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 01, 2016 12:44 pm 
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Diogenes, You do have a point, I think. Hope Six is certainly uneven, and I struggled for a while to work out why I felt that until reflecting that where there are flaws (what I in my infinite wisdom regard as flaws!) they’re due to Polly deliberately turning away from her own imagination in favour of reportage. I can see why she’s done this, and I think it’s bold and brave, but in the long run perhaps not as fruitful as following the main channel of her genius, especially when the material her travels have furnished her with is actually quite slight. There’s also the compositional method of trying to work poetry into songs: one critic talked about ‘the sound of square pegs being hammered into round holes’ which I think is fair (you could level that criticism at Let England Shake too). In fact, given how it was put together, I think it’s a testament to her colossal talent that she’s made the album as triumphant as, in places, it is. I fear that when we go to Brixton in October I’ll be in tears a lot of the time, and she’s rarely made me cry before.

Polly was already talking about ‘getting out of the way of the narrative’ in connection to White Chalk back in 2007, and the recent trend is an intensification of that desire – a desire which I suspect comes from some deep personal gear-shift she underwent in 2004-5 and about which we can only guess. However there are paradoxes and pointers in the other direction. I think ‘Guilty’ didn’t go on the album precisely because it’s a work of pure imagination rather than reportage, so she’s not gone completely shy of making things up; and that little 2012 song for Mark Cousins’s film, ‘Bobby Don’t Steal’, which someone here described as ‘a small masterpiece’, is very much along the old PJ lines. ‘Dollar Dollar’, in contrast, is totally personal, openly based on something that happened to her for pretty much the first time in her entire career. I didn’t really like it, but the article by the Afghan girl in Vice saying how much she was moved to hear her people being treated as real human beings changed my view even of that.

If it’s true, as someone said, that Polly conceived both LES and Hope 6 as part of a trilogy right from the beginning, we’ve got another work to come in this vein, and then what? Some have suggested she may call it a day, but again back in 2007 she talked about being on ‘a lifelong journey to explore what it means to be human through music’, and I take heart from that.

Ultimately, this is someone I love and trust beyond the odd mis-step or lapse. I’m glad she wants to take us to unfamiliar places.


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