http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslo ... 7f2ebf4c80PJ Harvey has us all marching to her irresistible beat
Steve Moffatt, NewsLocal
January 24, 2017 1:02pm
IT was clear that we were in for an arresting night from the entrance of PJ Harvey’s band marching on stage with four snare drums to the irresistible beat of Chain of Keys from her Grammy-nominated latest album The Hope VI Demolition Project.
With the 10 musicians all dressed in black and lit by brilliant spotlights with a silver backdrop, this was going to be a show in primal colours dealing with confronting subjects unflinchingly, often delivered with an ironic sweetness but always with Harvey’s eye to the truth.
The new album, which made up nine of the 19-song setlist, was made after Harvey spent time travelling to Kosovo — the inspiration for the pivotal track The Wheel — and to Washington DC to visit the Hope VI Demolition Project where run-down housing areas have been demolished and replaced by homes which the original inhabitants cannot afford.
VISCERAL
Like her last album, Let England Shake, which was featured on her 2012 tour here, her new material deals with the big political and social issues — America’s poverty gap (The Ministry of Social Services), the war on terrorism (The Ministry of Defence) and pollution (River Anacostia).
Listening to it through headphones is impressive enough, but live the visceral rhythms, wailing saxophones and Harvey’s distinctive soprano voice over an all-male chorus echoing in unison or harmonising are incredibly powerful.
Visually Harvey prefers a choreographed “tableau” approach where the stage lighting pinpoints each song and then cuts to semi-darkness while the band rearranges itself with slick precision.
The two drummers, often augmented by Harvey’s long-time musical associate John Parish, and some extraordinarily deft multi-instrumentalists including former Bad Seed Mick Harvey, sometimes threatened to rearrange the listener’s ear wax, resembling an industrial rock symphony orchestra.
Alongside the powerful messages of The Hope VI Demolition Project Harvey interspersed the set with some of her best songs from the pre-Brexit indictment of her homeland, Let England Shake, including The Glorious Land, the eloquent and deeply felt condemnation of Britain and America’s involvement in Afghanistan with refrain “What is the glorious fruit of our land? Its fruit is deformed children”.
And for the fans who have been following her for nearly a quarter of a century and collecting her albums there were some golden oldies, including 50ft Queenie and Is This Desire and, for one of her encores, a blistering cover of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.
The scene for the 90-minute show had been set by the return of two musicians who were a minor sensation at the 2015 Sydney Festival, drummer Jim White (Dirty Three) and Cretan lute player and singer George Xylouris.
This was an unlikely pairing of instruments but it worked wonderfully (so much so that their first album together Goats took out a Billboard’s World Music award).
It’s a mixture of jazz, Cretan folk and dance tunes and all with a nice post-punk feel.
The perfect curtain-raiser to the magnificent and compelling PJ Harvey.
SYDNEY FESTIVAL
● CONCERT: PJ Harvey
● WHERE: ICC Theatre, Darling Harbour
● WHEN: Sunday, January 22.