Regardless of where she happens to fall on the political spectrum, I don't blame her for keep her opinions to herself. Since the beginning of her career, she's come across as pretty thoughtful and nuanced person and I suspect that any statement she might make would be the same. But those types of statements and opinions generally do pretty poor in our media and, I think, especially now. Someone somewhere would take issue with it, or some small part of it, simplify it, take it out of context and then feed it into the outrage machine with their own inflammatory statement or headline. Then the blow back would come, but not for what she actually said, but what this other person(s) stated she said. At that point she would have already lost. We all know the cycle. So all of that along with the fact that her mental health has suffered in the past because of her career and putting herself out in the media makes me think that she's simply protecting herself.

I think the most straightforward political statement we're going to get from her will be in a performance, like when she recited "No Man is an Island" at Glastonbury in 2016 after Brexit.

I don't blame Polly Jean Harvey for not talking about her political opinions or her personal life. That is none of our business. Maybe it has a lot to do with how she grew up in Dorset, England as a child. I love her music too. I believe there are lots of fans who would love to see Polly Jean Harvey perform songs like Good Fortune, Evol, Uh-Huh-Her, You Come Through, Long Snake Moan and plenty of others she has not played in many years, Then again she is in her fifties now.

Mojo review

https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/pj-harvey-i-inside-the-old-year-dying-review/

DRISK, DRUSH, GAWLY, zun. Chammer, mampus, twiddicks, vog. It’s been seven years since Polly Harvey last released an album, but thanks to the expressive Dorset dialect clumped and scattered across I Inside The Old Year Dying, you could well believe it’s been several centuries. With 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, Harvey cast herself in a thoroughly modern role – the reporter making sense of the world by travelling to Afghanistan, Kosovo, the poorest neighbourhoods of Washington DC, collating her findings in smokedamaged song-dispatches. Despite the brilliant, scorched immediacy of the music, this telling of other people’s stories came with an inherent distance, Harvey’s long-standing gift for reporting on the internal frontlines of desire and distress not wholly transferable to external warzones.

I Inside The Old Year Dying is a very different prospect. It tells a story that belongs to Harvey completely, her own occult Ordnance Survey map, sunk deep in the soil where she was raised. With a few modifications and edits, the lyrics to these songs are pieces from Orlam, the poem cycle Harvey published last April. Early-’90s interviews with Harvey often expressed a fascination with her farm-girl upbringing in Dorset – not least her tales of lamb-castration, an act that features in these poems (“nuts”, helpfully, is glossed as both “joy” and “testicles”). With Orlam, she reclaimed that past, creating a fictional world as earthy as it is ethereal, its dank, thorny landscape so vividly rendered you feel a tetanus shot might be required after reading.

The book tracks a year in the life of a Dorset girl called Ira-Abel Rawles, who endures the perversity of bestial men, falls in love with the ghost of an English Civil War soldier – part Christ, part Elvis and ambiguously sheds her childhood innocence. All this spills into I Inside The Old Year Dying, the complex character-based narrative necessarily stripped out to sharpen the focus on broader themes of death and rebirth. “So look before and look behind/ At life and death all intertwined,” sings Harvey on Prayer At The Gate, the song that opens the album with an eerie horn-like summons, like Warren Ellis as Herne The Hunter. On I Inside The Old I Dying, rustling guitars part for a moment of explicit transformation. “Slip from my childhood skin/I zing through the forest,” sings Harvey, before joining “the chalky children of evermore”, a ghostly rank of souls, lost or otherwise.

It makes sense, then, that I Inside The Old Year Dying should feel both like a fresh start and a kind of culmination. Its roots stretch back into Harvey’s past work, back to Sheela-Na- Gig’s primal superstitions or To Bring You My Love’s silty blues. There are echoes of the lost girls of Is This Desire?, of the folk horror/folk memory of Let England Shake, of White Chalk’s etherised waifs and wraiths. Folklore, sex, death, love: it’s nose-to-tail Harvey.

The sense of homecoming is underlined by the tight circle of musicians: alongside Harvey’s guitar, keyboards and bass clarinet are trusted long-time collaborators John Parish (on drums, synthesizers and trombone) and co-producer Flood. Adam ‘Cecil’ Bartlett adds field recordings and “sonic disturbance”, while actors Colin Morgan and Ben Whishaw provide sensitive, low-key backing vocals. Whether the soft Doors-like swell of Seem An I, or the martial abrasions of A Noiseless Noise, these songs let in what they need to let in – although, as the uncanny loops and distortions suggest, they can’t keep everything undesirable out. There are toads and hedgehogs, birds and beetles; something rustles in the hedgerows. There’s a porousness, a to-and-fro between inside and outside, now and then, dream and reality. In Autumn Term, for example, the textbook new start becomes a more profound transformation. “I ascend three steps to hell/The school bus heaves up the hill,” sings Harvey, punctuated by Throbbing Gristle-like bursts of playground mayhem. “Look behind yourself, red-eyed/’Gainst the wilder-mist to what you’ll find”. Wilder-mist is translated as the “steam on a window”; rub your hand across the condensation, suggests Harvey, clear a space to see, and you might catch sight of something unexpected, something out of time, out of place.

That’s explicit on Lwonesome Tonight (sic), where incongruous packed-lunch Americana – “Pepsi fizz/Peanut-and-banana sandwiches” – and echoes of Elvis Presley jar against a supernatural sexual awakening in the woods. The Nether-Edge, meanwhile, evokes the warped electronics and between-worlds hovering of 1998’s Is This Desire?, a needling incantation that quotes Hamlet and alludes to Joan Of Arc in a psychic pile-up of past and present. Harvey’s voice is equally slippery, oscillating between confiding whisper and high keen; on the toad-licking A Child’s Question, July, the kind of feverish folk whirl that could bring the witchfinder general to town, she sings with almost child-like plaintiveness of a “Horny devil/Goaty god”. It could be hammy goth ventriloquising, but it’s too close to the ground for that.

Without a read-through of Orlam, I Inside The Old Year Dying might err towards the cryptic; even with one, it’s no moon/June riot. The atmospheres Harvey and her collaborators create are so thickly sustained, though, they quickly draw you towards their emotional core. The title track stomps onwards over twig-crack percussion, wracked by pain and grief; A Child’s Question, August warms up into a song of yearning, nature-poetry detail and Victorian lace not masking its rock’n’roll ancestry: “Help me dunnick, drush and dove/Love me tender/Tender love”.

In 2019, Harvey’s Instagram account marked her birthday by posting two pictures of the singer standing in a Dorset field, taken 40 years apart. With that ambiguous title suggesting both a backwards glance at all that has been lost, and a move into the future, I Inside The Old Year Dying holds itself at the biting point between old and new, re-evaluation and revelation. What lies on the other side, only Polly Harvey knows, but this is a record she was born to make.

Riff Magazine review

https://riffmagazine.com/album-reviews/ ... ear-dying/

Rock and grunge pioneer PJ Harvey has consistently changed her sound and structure with each album. I Inside the Old Year Dying, the British singer-songwriter’s first album in seven years and her 10th overall, is yet another example of her artistic and vocal prowess. and of her fearlessness in diving headfirst into new territory.
While 2011’s Let England Shake was loud and politically charged, here Polly Jean Harvey takes a step back and explores her own growth.
This record is deeply personal from the get-go; a love letter that the multi-Mercury-Music-Prize-winner wrote to herself to ignite a creative spark during a quiet period in her life. Flood and John Parish produced the album, and Parish also accompanied Harvey, along with Cecil and Ben Whishaw. It’s an evocative journey into her mind and creative process.
In a way, this body of work is Harvey’s way of connecting to her younger self – a version less jaded by the lifestyle of being a major artist who’s constantly creating, releasing and touring one record after another. This sentiment is seen throughout this album, particularly on lead single “A Child’s Question, August.” The song is a beautiful and nostalgic lullaby that hints at 2007’s White Chalk with poetic lyrics inspired by “Macbeth.”

“Starling swarms will soon be lorn/ Rooks tell stories ’cross the corn/ Goocoo soon will ’es leave make/ Swifts abandon autumn’s ache/ What says dunnick, drush or dove?/ Love Me Tender?/ Tender love?” she sings.

The title track and the similarly titled “I Inside the Old I Dying” are both as soft as they are eerie, with a steady, slow ascending percussion.

“Slip from my childhood skin/ I zing through the forest/ I hover in the hallway/ And laugh into the leaves,” she sings on the latter. The backing vocals, guitars, field recordings and biblical references accompanying the black and white stop-motion video directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña add more depth.

Penultimate song “A Child’s Question, July” is more upbeat, but lyrically goes hand in hand with the rest of the album, which incorporates themes like summer, death and rebirth – plausibly a testimonial to the artistic creation process of the album itself.

“All Souls,” on the other hand, is a drastic shift from the more acoustic feel of the singles, with Harvey singing and counting in a whisper alongside a synth that, in the beginning, emulates pop or electronic music before the percussion and piano slowly creep in and darken the energy of it all. “Seem an I” is an earworm that incorporates gradual layering and building on what starts off as Harvey’s solo vocals and into what sounds a bit like Nirvana’s “Polly” or “Dumb.”

One of the most intriguing aspects of PJ Harvey’s catalog is that she doesn’t limit herself to one tone or genre, nor does she shy away from using her voice in unconventional ways, oftentimes singing in a drastic variety of ranges. The comparisons to Patti Smith or Yoko Ono are apt here.

She finds strength and inspiration in the uncomfortably unknown, and finds meaning in simply being true to where she is emotionally at the time. The message is at the forefront, and the music is simply the tool to help convey it. If anything, the way in which I Inside the Old Year Dying was formed is proof that letting go and allowing art to come together at its own pace can be worthwhile.

By Vera Maksymiuk

yeah... no.
both "Polly" and "Dumb" are amazing songs ( "Polly" is one of my favorite Nirvana's songs ) BUT they have nothing to do with "Seem an i";

"Seem an i" is very Doors-like, the cymbals playing is the same, and PJ's "vocal technique" sounds a lot like Jim Morrison's. Plus we know Polly is a Doors fan, so the similarities i and before me a journalist noticed are grounded.

if you want to check yourselves "Polly" and "Dumb":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNd0dNzNpGo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrlaVYKWeLU

thank you for sharing, though.

There was a PJH special early this morning on BBC6, here is the info from John Parish's Facebook page. Lauren Laverne just said that the interview will be tomorrow in her show.

Wall St. Journal review:

‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ by PJ Harvey Review: Parsing Her Poetry
Full of arresting sounds, images and references to Elvis, the eclectic English singer-songwriter’s 10th studio album is filled with cryptic lyrics that repay close listening.

By Mark Richardson
July 4, 2023

PJ Harvey is an artist who follows her own path and intersects with the mainstream when the broader public swings her way, rather than the other way around. Her earliest music on record was squarely in the alternative-rock vein, when grunge was ascendant, and her albums “Dry” (1992) and “Rid of Me” (1993) were quickly recognized as classics of the form. But the style turned out to be just one of many interests for the English singer.

Over time, formative influences like the avant-rock of Captain Beefheart, the nightmare cabaret of Tom Waits, and the Bible-steeped mysticism of Nick Cave asserted themselves, and Ms. Harvey’s work took a decidedly art-rock turn. Starting with 1995’s “To Bring You My Love,” each of her solo albums was its own world, with a fresh approach to singing and arranging and songs connected by themes that ranged from war and conflict to the mystery of human desire. Two of these records, 2000’s “Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea” and 2011’s “Let England Shake,” won the Mercury Prize, the annual award given to the best album by a British or Irish artist (she is the only two-time winner). In recent years, she has turned her attention to poetry, including the 2022 book “Orlam,” a narrative in verse written in the dialect of her native Dorset. Her 10th studio album, “I Inside the Old Year Dying” (Partisan), out Friday, shares its idiom and themes with that book. This LP is on the challenging end of the spectrum as Ms. Harvey’s work goes—musically, it’s always interesting and often brilliant, but the lyrics require listening strategies that sit outside of rock and pop.

“Orlam” was in part about a child growing up in rural England, surrounded by the life and death of the natural world, and such imagery crops up frequently on the record. From the opening track, “Prayer at the Gate,” it’s clear that Ms. Harvey is projecting from deep within a world that takes some time for the listener to enter. The first song has an intensely atmospheric early section, with Ms. Harvey singing chanted vowels over curling wisps of synth. When she sings on the track, it’s in her tremulous upper range, where her phrasing seems less sure and doesn’t hide signs of strain and effort. To the American ear unfamiliar with her sources, Ms. Harvey’s lyrics here scan as cryptic and Joycean, conveying meaning through the sound of the language as well as via the imagery. “The ash embowered night and day,” goes a typical line in the opening song. The following “Autumn Term” is as difficult to parse lyrically while the arrangement is imbued with emotion, as a simple piano line bumps against a syncopated drumbeat. Halfway through, we hear children screaming—it’s one of many field recordings Ms. Harvey incorporates into the mix—which lends a potent dose of drama.

Another intriguing motif that winds through the album is the repetition of references to Elvis Presley. These tidbits are often abstract, nestled alongside images of nature. It’s almost as if the King becomes part of the landscape for the lonely child at the center of the music, his presence not unlike a favorite tree or a misty pond. The third track, “Lwonesome Tonight,” which borrows a fragment of an Elvis song and presents it with a Dorset spelling, is filled with surreal pop-culture references. Over a folky guitar line and light hand percussion, Ms. Harvey sings in her high voice amid distant tendrils of synth. “In her satchel, Pepsi fizz / Peanut-and-banana sandwiches” evokes Elvis’s favorite snack, while the next line mentions “Love Me Tender.” It’s a pointed example of the album’s virtues—musically arresting, with collisions of images that defy precise meaning but convey feelings nonetheless.

While the language is often inscrutable, it’s always intriguing. On “Seem an I,” she begins the song by singing a cappella, accompanied only by a recording of cows mooing in the distance, and offers lyrics of inherent musicality—“as belling from the bwoneyard / a-rangled round the archet”—that are difficult to decode. On “The Nether-edge,” Ms. Harvey’s voice is so high in the mix it scans as a confrontation, forcing the listener to try to make sense of what she’s singing about. Her words are heavy on alliteration and utterly original—“Femboys in the forest find figs of foul freedom” goes one line, over a distant metallic creak of the percussion—and then just as you’re tuning in, the song ends abruptly.

As the album unfolds, the references to Elvis become more frequent. On the 10th track, “August,” she sings, “‘Vore I leave / Someone please, / Love Me Tender / ’neath the trees,” and partway through a male voice enters to offer a line or two of the classic ballad. In the press notes, Ms. Harvey mentions that while working on this material, she found herself returning to the joy and satisfaction that simple, iconic songs can bring. Those found here are anything but simple, yet there’s a joy in the sense of exploration, as Ms. Harvey brings the fractured, dreamlike narrative to life with words that wriggle like living creatures. This may well be her most experimental album, and it’s certainly not one for someone who lost touch with her music in the ’90s—both “Let England Shake” and 2016’s “The Hope Six Demolition Project” are much more accessible, though each is intricate and strange in its own way. But “I Inside the Old Year Dying” is a solid testament to her restless and wide-ranging approach to her art, a record that, for those inclined to put in the time and effort, will mean much more on the 10th play than it does on the first.

https://archive.ph/9MnqY#selection-297.0-304.0

There's an interview with Lauren Laverne on BBC radio 6 from about an hour in. Polly, John and Flood. Worth a listen if the BBC will let you, otherwise hopefully someone will grab it and post it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001n53k

Review from Far Out.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/pj-harvey-i-inside-the-old-year-dying-album-review-highs-and-lows-in-a-caterwauling-journey-of-eccentric-weirdness/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

PJ Harvey - 'I Inside the Old Year Dying' album review: highs and lows in a caterwauling journey of eccentric weirdness (2/5)

Going into any new PJ Harvey album, you always know that expectations are futile. She is a unique star who exists outside of typical stardom, following her own muse no matter where it takes her and seeming barely holding a care about how the resultant exploration is received. Her new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, typifies both the highs and lows of that singular, belligerent approach.

Things start in the come-hither of a haunting shimmer. ‘Prayer at the Gate’ is a mystic swirl of strained ambiance and a tepid drumbeat pushing things languidly forth, while Harvey’s vocals provide a sense of wavering folk melody waltzing through it all. It is an implacable piece of music, somewhere beyond the last mortgaged edges of civility, but not quite a waltz through the wilderness of some darkened spiritual wood. Ultimately, this sense of tinkering on the edge of both dissonance and escapism leaves you unsure, uneasy, but allured to the record.

Then, with your interest just about piqued by the peculiar opening, the right hook of ‘Autumn Term’ and its bombastic weirdness might very well have you laughing your cap off. The track features a comic caterwauling racket like no other. Without being glib when it comes to an album that clearly prides itself on extreme, wistful spiritualism, it is impossible to wrestle away the notion that this is being sang by South Park’s Mr. Garrison.

The vocals on the track are like a piece of modern art you stumble across in the MoMA and conclude that it is so comically bad that surely must’ve be the intent in the first place. It is, in short, the sort of song that proves indefensible for us poor old avant-garde fans; when this blares out of the speaker, and a less alternative-inclined friend comments, ‘What on earth is this? A cat being strangled?’, you’ll have no choice but to utter, ‘She’s usually better than this,’ and then hurriedly check the album credits to ensure that Minnie Mouse wasn’t maimed in the making of the record to achieve this tortured shrill.

However, while that might all sound truly damning for the comeback LP, it is merely the worst symptom of Harvey’s unique artistry. She is able to brush this low aside and reap the benefits of artistic individualism elsewhere. Latter tracks like ‘The Nether-edge’ and ‘August’ see her seize upon a fresh trip hop and traditional folk meddling that sounds unlike anything you’ve heard before for the right reasons rather than a mere dissonant departure of pure counterpoint. The strange whirling world of these songs form an alluring miasma that might lend themselves to clearer judgement years down the line.

But by the same token, quite a lot is lost in this liminal netherworld. The album itself arose out of Harvey reaching a place where she was sadly suddenly bewildered by music and her place in it. Then the artist and filmmaker, Steve McQueen, told her, “Polly, you have to stop thinking about music like it’s all albums of songs. You’ve got to think about what you love. You love words, you love images and you love music. And you’ve got to think, What can I do with those three things?”

This is all well and good and it certainly helped her recapture her passion, but it results in kaleidoscopic wisps of ideas that are hard to cling to as a mystified listener. Given her songwriting prowess, I’m sure there are moments of great brilliance in this odious album -brief lyrical flourishes of biblical imagery signpost this – but they pass you by like freebies being handed out on a crowded high-street when your in a hurry to the end. In the obverse of not being able to see the wood for the trees, you find yourself so tossed and turned by the whole wailing weirdness and the often unpleasantness of that maudlin barrage that the fine details of greatness and interest cast among it are too hard to decipher.

Harvey wanted to create a record that you can “get lost” in; she achieves this with aplomb, but all too-often it isn’t much of a comfortable escape to the country, more akin to losing grip of your mother’s hand in a busy supermarket than an embalming wander through the woods. Harvey has exorcised her tormented years as an artist dissociated from her craft and placed that process on record, owing to her class that means there are moments of magic and thrilling innovation, but there are also moments where you wonder whether any of this was done with the listener in mind. Because while the album’s idiosyncratic artistic headway might be applaudable from an academic standpoint, I highly doubt it is one that fans will be returning to all that often.

Outsideleft review by Tim London:

https://www.outsideleft.com/main.php?updateID=2749&utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork

PJ HARVEY
I Inside The Old Year Dying
(Partisan Records)
2/5

Listening to the sombre songs of I Inside the Old Year Dying it can feel like reading mood notes left on a mantlepiece, written by someone slightly distracted with every day existence - tending the garden, shopping, telly and chats with a small group of friends. Perhaps this would explain the slightly detached, puzzled pervading air. Ironically the song titles are more assured and promise more than the music.

Sung in a purer than Patti Smith croon and with instrumentation that occasionally reminds me of the psych folk that manifested so thoroughly in Paul Giovani’s imagined bucolic world of Olde Britain soundtrack for The Wicker Man. There are other connections with, for instance, the pulsating mono-synth lines of Silver Apples, subtly sitting under a couple of tracks. I also hear the Kinks’ Ray Davies at his most introspective and, somehow, an essence of the 1990s in the weary performances. Almost as if Polly is a bit fed up with PJ.

One of the problems for artists who came up during the 1990s is the desperate need of the now-40+ somethings to have their own legion of stardust sprinkled icons. This results in, say the mass karaoke performances of Pulp’s velvet suited live return or Blur’s recent return to the stage. Unfortunately Polly Harvey sits, perhaps uncomfortably, amongst these minor heroes who rode in on the horses of wilder and more original items from previous eras. Polly might actually, like Bjork and Jeff Buckley have a genuine right to the kind of iconic status that should be reserved for genuine originals. But I’m not sure.

The album takes itself seriously in the same way Radiohead albums do - self-referential and self-reverential, but unlike the Oxford proggies includes elements that suggest some fun was had, such as the zombie Bee Gee tracking the lead vocal on Autumn Term, which also includes the most fabulous use of playground sampling since Go! Team.

The production is… safely disappointing. There’s no sonic challenge, just what I presume is a fairly faithful recording of studio performance. So everything depends on if you are A PJ fan or not and I’m sort of not, still, despite listening with as little jaundice as possible. If the album was as interesting as Polly Harvey’s carefully honed persona (honed, admittedly, more by absence than hype) then it would truly be worth celebrating.

Review by NME

PJ Harvey – ‘I Inside The Old Year Dying’ review: immersive return from modern master
The Dorset-born musician's first album since 2016 is both elusive and mesmerising

By Elizabeth Aubrey 5th July 2023

It’s been a long, seven-year wait for PJ Harvey’s new album. Her last, ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’, took a toll. Travelling to areas destroyed by war and poverty, it was a powerful, but emotionally draining, record to make. “I wasn’t sure… if I wanted to carry on writing albums or playing, or if it was time for a change in my life,” the musician reflected recently, adding she was “heartbroken” that she’d lost her connection to music.

During the ensuing period, Harvey instead turned to poetry, soundtracks and scores via some mentoring from poet Don Paterson and some sage advice from filmmaker Steve McQueen, the latter who advised her to find a way to combine her love of words, images and music that went beyond the traditional album format she was now struggling to create within. ‘I Inside The Old Year Dying’ was born out of her last poetry book, 2022’s Orlam, and is effectively a collection of twelve poems set to music – and Harvey has never sounded freer.

The album follows the life of a young girl, Ira-Abel Rawles, as she navigates a thorny path from childhood to adolescence. It’s set within an ever-changing landscape – like the one Harvey came from, and still inhabits, today – and it sounds like it’s from another era thanks to Harvey enunciating in dense, archaic Dorset dialect. Words like “drisk”, “drush” and “gawley” roll lushly from Harvey’s tongue, while field recordings of the surrounding countryside make it feel like Harvey’s most immersive album yet.

Standout ‘Autumn Term’ sees a young Rawles dread another day at school. “I ascend three steps to hell. The school bus heaves up the hill,” Harvey sings in an almost unrecognisable high-pitched register as sounds of children echo in the background. Like many songs set in autumn and winter on the album, it’s musically sparse – a lone piano here, a quiet guitar there.

Harvey’s career has been characterised by continual Bowie-like reinvention and this is one her biggest about-turns both structurally and musically. Harvey’s voice, which is the biggest instrument on the album, inhabits either eerie whispers or uncanny falsettos thanks to some experimental live production techniques from co-producer Flood.

It’s seen starkly on ‘Lwonesome Tonight’ where in the blink of an eye, Rawles is a teenager, having sexual awakenings in a forest with an imaginary lover as she yearns for someone to “love me tender”. It’s a nod to the King of Rock’n’Roll via a mythical figure called Wyman-Elvis, a kind of hybrid God and Elvis Presely who intoxicates Rawles’ imagination.

Her former partner Nick Cave linked Elvis and God on ‘Tupelo’ and ‘Ghosteen’, but in Harvey’s world, Wyman-Elvis represents a fine line between death and life. Time is forever on Harvey’s mind on this album as she enters her fifth decade: she sings about death often, like on the bleak ‘All Souls’ where she contemplates “a flesh farewell”. The ‘Hail To The Thief’-leaning ‘Prayer At The Gate’ see Harvey wonder, via a Thom Yorke-like falsetto, “look before and look behind / at life and death all intertwined” against a backdrop of long-term collaborator James Parish’s skeletal guitars and unsettling, drone-y synths.

Harvey remains – also like Bowie – famously elusive: trying to find autobiographical touchstones is often futile. Yet the girl of ‘Lwonesome Tonight’ who “yearns yet to ungirl” mirrors Harvey’s lifelong fascination with shunning gendered identity tropes amid male gazes, while the eerie title-track sees Rawles desperate to escape a restrictive past – “slip from my childhood skin” – and find freedom in the wilderness – to “zing through the forest”, something Harvey has done throughout her career.

Elsewhere, Rawles frequently escapes inside her own imagination via folky fever dreams (‘A Child’s Question, July’) and electronic dreamscapes (‘A Child’s Question, August’). There are many literary and historical references – Shakespeare, Joan of Arc and Romantic poets like Keats and Coleridge – but references to the latter seem to be at the heart of what the album is about: trying to see the world anew by reconnecting to your past and nature.

Closer ‘A Noiseless Noise’ is the culmination of this as Harvey sings hopefully, “Go home now, love, leave your wandering,” on a track that builds to a crescendo of crashing guitars. She’s seemingly found what she’s looking for on a track that recalls more classic Harvey-eras, after thrashing through the past and the wild.

“I think the album is about searching, looking… and seeking meaning,” Harvey said recently. While the meaning part is sometimes tough to decipher – far more so than her previous work – it’s not the answer here that’s important but the journey. It takes a little time to immerse yourself in Harvey’s world, but once there, you won’t want to leave.

Source: https://www.nme.com/reviews/album/pj-harvey-i-inside-the-old-year-dying-review-3465062#google_vignette

Some very bad reviews above. I will have to give this a few listens to get the feel for it. I've heard the entire thing once, on an iMac (so no good amp/speakers).

Everyone is of course entitled to their own opinion but I wouldn't trust a review from Far Out Magazine with coming up with any valuable insight - this publication is a pretty sad online rag producing no worthwile content of its own and mostly aggregating old articles from elsewhere as clicbkait for bored boomers whose music taste stopped developing in the mid-70s.

Thanks for posting the Wall Street Journal review, though - M. Richardson is a very good music writer, I miss his regular contributions at Pitchfork.

Thanks for sharing, this was a great interview. Love listening to all three of them together. (the interview starts at 1:07:00 circa).






oh, on the "Outsideleft" and "Far Out" articles, they are, pardon the french, so far up their own bums that i'll resort to quoting Dante: "non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa" =Let us not Speak of them: look and pass on.

PJ Harvey, John Parish and Flood interviewed by Lauren Laverne on BBC 6 Music (05/07/2023), Part I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxY_XsYyE1k


PJ Harvey, John Parish and Flood interviewed by Lauren Laverne on BBC 6 Music (05/07/2023), Part II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSSR9j9BP2g