I agree, also they asked him separately, she clearly didn't know that was going to be set up. Its just a media gimmick to make their programme more interesting and lazy journalism to turn it into news.

Is she saying its a political album? Or just that she's got political views but isn't going to share them. I like that its ambiguous and not taking a position on the causes of war.

One of the posts of the year, soulfadelic!

It was interesting Polly mentioning Fallujah in an interview. I thought of it when I first heard 'Written on the Forehead', particularly the image of people swimming; many people tried to flee the fighting by swimming across the river but were shot at from helicopters.

The American journalist Dahr Jamail went there and has written some incredible stuff. He has gone back to report on birth defects there too. I would post an article from his site but I can't get a connection to it at the moment.

Phillip Knightley's book 'The First Casualty' is a big recommendation. Look out for the documentary 'The War You Don't See' - recently aired on TV - on youtube as well.

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Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

Lady England
PJ Harvey addresses her country’s history of war with mordant wit and a beat you can (almost) dance to.
Nitsuh Adebe
Feb.13, 2011


It seems rare that an album would inspire the listener to spend time, during the less compelling tracks, idly Googling contextual information about World War I trench warfare and the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, in which thousands upon thousands of men died over a months-long, epically failed invasion of a few square miles of Ottoman peninsula. Rare outside of heavy-metal albums, anyway. But here you have it: Polly Jean Harvey’s latest LP does precisely that, and I fully intend to bore someone, sometime, with every last grim thing I just learned about death, dysentery, great black clouds of flies that never let you sleep, and soldiers breaking their teeth on old biscuits.

Try and track down how such an album came to be, and it begins to look like Harvey—an alternately primal and poetic British songwriter—might have spent a few months thinking about the same things as Britain’s actual poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. In the spring of 2009, Duffy gave the public a poem called “Last Post,” commemorating the deaths of the nation’s last few surviving World War I veterans, which borrows a few well-known lines from the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen. Around the same time, on the back half of an album she’d made with longtime collaborator John Parish, Harvey was singing about being a soldier, then echoing a line of World War II poetry from W. H. Auden. (“We must love one another or die,” he wrote—though she sings, ominously, “or accept the consequences.”) Duffy went on to ask her peers for more poetry about modern war, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Harvey went on to wonder why, if there could be more than a century’s worth of “war poets,” there mightn’t be a war songwriter.

Thus we get Let England Shake, on which she becomes one, and makes a captivatingly tricky job of it. The music here isn’t quite what you’d expect. The arrangements feel wobbly and unstable, as if they were looking at folk music through a fish-eye lens. Songs are haunted by off-key bugling, or oddly chosen samples; Harvey mostly plays autoharp, an instrument with a thin, watery sound. The best tracks sound both jaunty and spooky, like clap-along campfire songs for very strange children—eerie English folk marching tunes about war and nation and death. There’s something grave and unguessable and dangerously spry about them; you could dance to a few, but only in a really ambivalent way; and all of that is exactly as it should be.

A quick potted history of PJ Harvey might help explain things. Her music, over nearly twenty years of rock-critic gushing, has been described in many ways—it’s been explosive, imposing, mysterious, tightly controlled, alien, spellbinding, even “irrational”—but the line connecting most of the critiques is the sense that she’s aloof from us, a little unknowable. The word reptilian crops up often, too, and while that’s mostly about the scaly, slinking quality of her guitar playing, you can’t help but remember that humans and reptiles don’t have much intuitive understanding of one another.

That quality is, naturally, part of the appeal. There are musicians we relate to because we think they’re like us, and there are musicians we watch with jaws dropped, wishing we could maybe figure out how to be vaguely like them in a dream someday. Harvey’s closer to the latter. Her first few records were studies in aggressive aloofness: seething, sexually complicated, rattlesnake rock in which this woman, all red mouth and black boots, seemed to be staring people down, taunting them, and then sending them packing. The music was heavy and the lyrics were frank, full of body parts.

It’s in the career that’s rambled out of that—including music that’s less vicious and more bewitching—that allegations of aloofness have become an issue. Some of Harvey’s songs can slip mysteriously past you, as if she were conducting a private ritual that doesn’t require your understanding. Her last solo album, 2007’s White Chalk, ditched guitars in favor of bare-bones piano; amazingly enough, it managed to strike some listeners as full of harrowing raw emotion (one song seemed to be about the experience of having an abortion) and others as closed-off, uncommunicative, or mannered. It all seems to depend on how closely you think you should be required to pore over the stuff—and whether you think heaviness, fire, blood, and guts are physical things about the way music moves, or whether you locate them on some other, more abstract level.

The blood and guts on Let England Shake mostly belong to soldiers; they get splattered around several fronts, but not in the form of heavy music. One of the great things about this album is that its subject matter—a nation, its land, its people, its folk traditions, and its wars, from 1914 straight through tomorrow morning in Iraq—rewards a little mystery. Harvey wrote the lyrics first, then complicated things with her singing. She conjures images of battlefields and violent death and love of country, but it’s wonderfully hard to tell whom she’s speaking for, and when, and where she’s being angry, or sardonic, or just baffled. The cheeriest song here is “The Last Living Rose,” and it sounds like a homecoming soldier’s paean to a damp, drunk, violent England; it also feels awfully fond. (On this album, England is pronounced nostalgically, with three syllables and a phantom r: “En-gerland.”) Another tune uses a folk-song call-and-response to ask what the glorious nation’s soil is plowed with (tanks and marching feet!) and what fruit it bears (orphaned children!)—but the next one ends with her asking, in a wry American rock-and-roll voice, “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?”

You hesitate to call that arch. It might also be tacky to call it playful—the song is, after all, titled “The Words That Maketh Murder,” and it contains images of blown-up soldiers’ limbs hanging from the branches of trees. There’s nothing funny here to call gallows humor. But Harvey’s approach to a subject so large might actually be a fitting case of, say, “gallows ambiguity”: a light touch that leaves things with exactly the right amount of weird opacity and mixed feelings. That murder tune is actually something you can shimmy and twist to, and if there’s not a kind of mordant wit to that, then I don’t know what to say.

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Daily Californian review


Ryan Lattanzio

PJ Harvey's eighth studio album Let England Shake is certainly the singer/songwriter's most politically minded to date, yet such an exclamation does not take away from its accessibility. Still, she doesn't let up on the poetry of war and violence.

A transgressive '90s rock icon, Harvey has since rounded the corners and softened the edges, but she remains a commanding presence. Simply put, there's no one like her. From the start, England's got her trademark spooky style down pat. The beachfronts and battleships here are ethereal, too.

The songwriting is top-notch: Standout track "The Glorious Land" is a battle dirge. Its percussion sounds like armor clanging as you're trudging through a war zone. Even a trumpet sneaks its way in. "The Words That Maketh Murder" boasts Harvey's sliding vocal register, that almost-yodel she's so good at. In "On Battleship Hill," she lets it all out, singing from a mountain of alt-fem-rock.

"All and Everyone," the album's conceptual centerfold, recalls vintage PJ, that warbling waif of Rid of Me (1993) and To Bring You My Love (1995). It's as if the track was recorded in the most depressing bathroom ever. The lyrics are like the callow diary entries of a schoolgirl trying her hand at poetry - "A bank of red earth, dripping down/Death is now" - but it works for her.

Though saying so does a disservice to the album's grand ambition, it must be noted that Let England Shake is short. Most songs clock in around three minutes, so it never feels like you're trying to "get through" this album. Harvey prefers precise melodies to rambling and rollicking, but like always, there's still the rocking-out. This may be just another PJ Harvey album, but England is the rare case where that's a good thing.

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Muso's Guide


It’s hard to pinpoint how much context shapes the way we hear and critically appraise music, but, without going out on too big of a limb, it’s probably has a large effect. If a release is timed well, or situated well within the narrative of an artists career, chances are it’ll sound better than if it isn’t, at least initially. With that in mind, the context surrounding PJ Harvey‘s new record, Let England Shake, is about as positive as it can be and it takes a lot of strength to resist its influence. It just all sounds so perfect: a big, intelligent concept, that of a songwriter trying to do what commissioned war poets and photographers do for their respective fields.

Add to that the fact that it’s another album where PJ Harvey is refusing to go in the direction you would expect her to, which judging by how many artists succumb to trying to second-guess their fans and give them what they think they want (REM, for instance), is a pretty great achievement. And the fact that two of her most successful collaborators, Mick Harvey and John Parish, are the other principal musicians on it. Overall, before the record has started spinning, or before you’ve even dragged the tracks onto your mp3 player, your ears are pulling you towards the conclusion that it’s great, or at least a very respectable effort.

But is it? Her previous record, White Chalk, was a similarly exciting and tantalising prospect – learning new instruments, adopting a whole new sound, singing like she was trapped in a haunted Victorian orphanage – but was let down by a lack of variety or strong songcraft. This record is much stronger in both regards, and the overarching concept manages to drag the more pedestrian efforts up by the scruff of their neck and make them seem more than they actually are.

There are experiments that don’t quite work, songs that don’t go anywhere, and the lyrics, clearly very important to this album, follow the White Chalk model of trying to achieve power through a bluntness and a hyperbole that can be very clumsy-sounding at times. Because of these drawbacks, the adulation it is receiving in pre-release reviews seem to be based on not separating the context from the product, being far too impressed that PJ Harvey is doing this sort of thing rather than concentrating how good this sort of thing actually is. But let’s not get distracted by the reservations – it is a very good, very exciting record, and her best in a long while.

In particular, the first half is an invigorating, experimental affair with some incredible peaks. The title track is the album condensed – simple, melodic, but with an adventurous discordance, both through the lyrics and through the slightly-off percussion and riffs chiming through it. ‘The Last Living Rose’ raises the bar even higher – a gorgeous piece of songwriting that takes a mournful pride in modern England, it feels distinct from the rest of the tracks in its tone of resignation but somehow it fits easily within the concept.

Its desolate sister-track ‘England’ again finds Harvey on top-form on a similar subject, her stark lone voice providing something similar to White Chalk but the strength of the song itself brings it above most of the sketches on that record. Before even engaging with the subject of war or its importance to this album, these songs are simply awesome in their own right and highlights of her career.

The highlight amongst these highlights is ‘Written on the Forehead’, a song unlike any other song with an atmosphere completely unique; apocalyptic, troubled, but somehow as celebratory as a song about a post-war landscape can be. When Harvey begins singing along with the ‘let it burn’ sample, the effect is completely spine-tingling.

On other tracks she doesn’t come close to managing this subtlety and ambiguity, but manages often to make a virtue of their opposites, in particular with songs like ‘All and Everyone’ becoming massive and booming as Harvey’s lyrics get more intense. And with ‘The Glorious Land’, as elsewhere, she creates drama through big, simple chord changes on her autoharp, which is consistently used to great effect, as the band follow her example with simplicity seemingly being the guiding principle as the song explodes into its OTT lyrical conclusion: “What is the glorious fruit of our land? / the fruit is deformed children”.

Which brings us to some of the albums drawbacks. As much as Harvey wants to be the objective reporter, bringing back stories of war, the images she choose will divide listeners, as they are intentionally jarring and stark. In one song “soldiers fall like lumps of meat”; in the next “death was everywhere”, and it does not really relent. Undoubtedly this will be seen as part of the album’s power, and it is of course necessary not to pull punches when it comes to subject-matter such as war. But often it feels like a lyrical quick-fix; instead of weaving stories of war or presenting scenarios that elucidate its tragedy, Harvey will often go straight for the jugular.

When the album truly succeeds, the lyrics mesh perfectly with the music – ‘The Last Living Rose’ and ‘Written on the Forehead’. But given their importance, they can sometimes come across as misguided and clumsy. And it’s not always simply the lyrics that are holding the album back from being a masterpiece. Some songs, especially in an inconsistent second half of the album, are simply forgettable. When the simplicity doesn’t work, it simply leaves half-formed songs with little for the listener to latch onto.

This is mercifully rare on Let England Shake though and the majority of its songs make a strong impression. It is a genuinely impressive work that gives enough to make you realise why some will get carried away with it and declare it perfect. The motivations behind these reactions are clear – basically, it is incredible that she is still making records the way she wants to and that they are still offering something very new. But stressing this too much gets in the way of appreciating the records true achievements. It’s not perfect but it is seriously impressive on its own terms – not because of the intentions behind it or the fact that it’s about the 20th album in a row where she has completely changed her sound – but because it is a very complete product with a number of moments that would rank high in any artists career.

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This Is Fake DIY (9/10)


Jamie Milton

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.

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^ All courtesy of menju56 at unforumzed

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PJ Harvey makes her case on the nation's state with Let England Shake

Album review: PJ Harvey's Let England Shake is an extraordinary piece of work and arguably her finest album yet.

Each PJ Harvey album has formed a distinct landmark, probably more so than any other contemporary artist. The creative restlessness of her early 1990s alt-rock became increasingly pronounced in her 21st-century work: the sweeping uplift of 2000’s Mercury-winning Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea; 2004’s powerfully raucous Uh Huh Her; the painful piano introspection of 2007’s White Chalk; and now her extraordinary eighth LP, Let England Shake.


Recorded again in her native Dorset, this is essentially Harvey’s take on a ‘war record’, infused with references from World War 1’s Gallipoli campaign to current conflicts, and performed by a band that includes former collaborator John Parish.

The sound is both earthy and exotic. Harvey’s imagery is heady and brutal, ranging from the battleground to foreign playgrounds (‘people throwin’ dinars at the belly dancers’ in Written On The Forehead), while her melodies are gorgeously disarming. The production is also exceptionally vital, layered with folky instruments (Harvey on autoharp and zither) and startling samples – The Words That Maketh Murder features a bugle reveille –while a reworked snippet of Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues (‘What if I take my problem to the United Nations?’) becomes an ominous modern mantra.

Elsewhere, there are elements of vintage reggae and 1920s Baghdad balladry. On England, Harvey’s not-so-green and pleasant land ‘leaves a taste, a bitter one’. The dust never settles on Let England Shake but the music definitely lingers – it’s utterly, refreshingly PJ Harvey

Five Stars



Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/music/reviews/85 ... z1DvfE5qRy

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Did anyone already post this?

http://www.i-donline.com/i-spy/i-n-conv ... -pj-harvey

Just starting on NPR: http://www.npr.org/music/

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Click to see the PJ Harvey Gigography

the i-d video is lovely, thanks

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with a palmful of stars I throw them like dice repeatedly until the desired constellation appears ♪♬

PJ Harvey’s universal soldier http://33revolutionsperminute.wordpress ... /pj-harvey’s-universal-soldier/

^ Nice read - thank you!

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Click to see the PJ Harvey Gigography

Thanks, Romario, that's a good find. Dorian Lynskey thinks the album is a masterpiece, which is incredible praise coming from someone who obviously knows his stuff about protest songs (another book to add to my list!).

Funnily enough, someone mentions Craiglockhart - where soldiers went to convalesce after suffering breakdowns, etc. at the front, during World War 1 - in the comments.

Just this week, I checked for the film 'Regeneration' - which I saw at the cinema a long time ago - on youtube, and found the scene where the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon meet for the first time at Craiglockhart, but the meeting in reality was different; still a good scene.

A gem of a film. Someone has posted all of it on youtube. I think this was the next film Johnny Lee Miller worked on after 'Trainspotting'...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzRR3jVgS0

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Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

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Snetta