The Hope Six Demolition Project new album info

[Black Hearted Love]

Oh My Gosh! just Found 'The Orange Monkey' on my iTunes library )))))

[Black Hearted Love]

Its kind of strange that the link Kuk91 posted earlier suggested the next single was A Line In The Sand. But do we know this song is a single, or perhaps she is just releasing a song each day in the lead up the album?

all tracks were leaked officially during 'Shake' so it is possible

[Kujjj]

Because if you think about it, it just so happens that its 9 days before the album is released and there are 9 more tracks, including orange monkey that we haven't heard. this makes me excited for tomorrow!

[Shadowboxer]

4 star review by themusic.com.au

PJ Harvey has made another important and challenging record. If there's a quibble, it might be the wish that she'd look inward at herself again rather than just dwelling on the wider world's ills.

I disagree with that last part. I think what she's doing is really important and especially needed in our current times. Saying you don't really care about the realities of the world is kind of dick-ish, no?
It's exactly this apathy that she's targeting with this.

[Kujjj]

I think the reviewer is just perhaps saying what some people might think, I've heard a few people complain about her subjects being less about herself. She's doing something new, and some people don't like that. I would add she's doing it rather well, its obvious a ton of though and care and planning went into the making of this album and every project that is part of this era in her career.

[somme]

Perhaps in a couple of albums time she'll look inward again. Maybe at how these previous few albums have changed her/her life, etc.

[Kuk91]

http://www.binaural.es/articulos/primer ... n-project/

Track-by-track Spanish review:

1 - 'The Community Of Hope'

One of the pieces we already knew. Drink directly from the sound of "Let The England Shake", especially its most daintily pop face with a Polly Jean who is guided at all times by an electric rhythm guitar. The choirs are painted with double choirs in "In the community of hope, The Community Of Hope ...", serving as a harbinger of things to enjoy in the rest of the album.

2 - 'The Ministry Of Defence'

Harvey takes the apocalyptic option with The Ministry Of Defence '. The epic song made with a sharp wrenching distorted rhythm that marks the tempo and the lead in the fourth minute and eleven seconds of the subject. Double chorus again become prominent in the flashpoints, joining the function to emphasize a face-off between loudness and Harvey most colossal figure of any premise offered the famous "crossovers" Marvel. Joy for the senses to appreciate, and much, fans of the most devastating and visceral Harvey. One of the climax of the album, no doubt.

3 - 'A Line In The Sand'

A golden and rhythmic fusion of essences displayed on 'The Glorious Land' and 'The Words That Maketh Murder' in "Let England Shake". Chispeos shaped taps dotting composition navigates a winding evenly. We are probably in 'A Line In The Sand' the piece that brings more light to the whole "The Hope Six Demolition Project", which serves as a prelude to what is offered in the next song called...

4 - 'Chain Of Keys'

The sinuous rhythm suddenly transforms one grim, loaded and packed with Baroque motifs. The counterpoint to that offered in 'A Line In The Sand', teleporting to complete his body to a more typical context of the mid-nineteenth century. It seems the perfect second part in a trilogy, in which a transition is issued, a change to a dark, introspective and overcharged trend. Drink the tormented tone of 'The Ministry of Defence', but does not cause shocks generated by the second play of the disc.

5 - 'River Anacostia'

One of the key points, not to say "EL" key to understanding the change of pace offered in "The Hope Six Demolition Project" point. Third of what started with 'A Line In The Sand', taking us by the hand and inviting us to participate in a dance around the campfire in a demonic coven lost in the mountains. The song combines everything that represents this disc. With sinister double choirs, rough texture and an evocative point that is most intriguing and disturbing. Is to think of this song come to me to mind the imaginary offered directly in that movie "The Witch" Robert Eggers presented at the last festival of Sitges. 'River Anacostia' is the perfect and synthesized "The Hope Six Demolition Project" representation, no more. The issue that at some point in their most primitive race their more advantaged disciples, Nadine Shah and Maika Makovski, had worshiped compose.

6 - 'Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln'

Corscombe the reverse check and recovers guided and winding path, without being carried away by the tone interrupted featured in 'River Anacostia' and 'The Ministry Of Defence'. 'Near The Memorials To Vietnam And Lincoln' it is the start of a small mini saga, one of the three pieces in "The Hope Six Demolition Project" in which Harvey plays with a rate of eternal crescendo, which seems ever It suggested that from the first second state is reached. There is no catharsis, no final orgasm, but there is a delicacy and a touch that causes them to enjoy every second of the memorable trip.

7 - 'The Orange Monkey'

The exciting backpacker route started with 'Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln' just immersing ourselves in the lush Amazon rainforest in 'The Orange Monkey'. This is another of the cuts that we already discover in advance in recent days. Primitive tribal motifs and symbols adorn beautifully evocative composition with both choirs as luminous contributions arising from the exploitation of wind.

8 - 'Medicinals'

Persecution in circles orchestrated by Harvey meeting its zenith in 'Medicinals'. This time the female choirs acquire greater relevance, lowering the density offered in the 'River Anacostia'. Sax exercises as a metronome, and as master of ceremonies in a harmonious dance that is unexpectedly interrupted at 1:34. Harvey, almost dark, enlightens us with her verses and crystal look to the end of the composition.

9 - 'The Ministry of Social Affairs'

Harvey teleports us to the deepest America. R&B and black N fifties serve as a starting point for a heady 'The Ministry of Social Affairs' which serves as the opposite side of the former, and already quoted, 'The Ministry of Defense'. The game here is not based on spitting or scratching, but in touch, to heal laments, is also translated into even hugs. Because delirium offered with the saxophone is an example of the particular form of seduction masterfully dominating the British lady. Therein no one wins.

10 - 'The Wheel'

In 'The Wheel' we leave the United States to tread the road of a devastated road near Kosovo. The disturbing magic of 'Chain Of Keys' is seared by the popular folklore in 'The Wheel', with verve, emotional and life, much life.

11 - 'Dollar, Dollar'

"The Hope Six Demolition Project" closes with a 'Dollar, Dollar' looking for a very gradual, very restrained growth. Here the game is based on juxtaposing layers sequentially. One after another, meticulously. Introducing first Harvey's voice, immediately afterwards to do the same with dual vocals, sax line, a suggestive and even environmental sounds. The rawness as devastating way to understand today's society in which all adds or subtracts, everything converges.

[Kuk91]

NME 3 star review: http://www.nme.com/reviews/pj-harvey/16436.

[somme]

Cheers for the reviews.

Seems like NME sort of got it but still not totally.

[Kuk91]

Seems like NME sort of got it but still not totally.

I really liked their theory about "The Community Of Hope", though: "Her dispassionate, probably ironic appropriation of the words of The Washington Post’s Paul Schwartzman as he drove her around Ward 7... <...> The song, which sounds like an impassioned protest rocker but attempts something more complex" - like it's a parody on a "bad protest song", written without fully knowing the context (remember how Polly said what a lot of protest music is done very badly?). Very interesting point of view IMO.

Maybe she was also exploring the psychological aftermath of segregation - to point out how the "white and wealthy folks" see the "black part" of their own city.

On the other hand, they wrote such a stupid thing about "Chain of Keys", calling it "exploitation": "You certainly get little sense of the woman as a person, and modern communication means that the people at the sharp end of geopolitics tell their own stories in their own voices far more often, rather than just serving as emotive images." - what, they want this poor old woman to tell her story using Internet (or TV)? Some people just don't have / don't need iPhones and stuff, you know. Polly was deeply moved by her story, she reminded her of grandmother, that's why she wrote the song.

[Shadowboxer]

FirstFT review

Chicage tribune review

An old blues song ushers in "The Ministry of Defence" before a saxophone spits out its revulsion: "A million beggars' silhouettes near where the money changers sit by their locked glass cabinets."

[Kuk91]

http://www.northerntransmissions.com/al ... pj-harvey/

"Similarly, a junked-up sax solo distorts and cracks the steady, staccato slam of the positively chilling “The Ministry of Defence.” Mid-way, Harvey offers up a jarring, matter-of-fact, list-style verse alluding to “syringes, razors, plastic spoons, human hair, a kitchen knife and the ghost of a girl who runs and hides.”"

"This time, a cyclical pump of a circus organ supports a floating vocal detailing the polluted Anacostia River <...>."

Also: https://twitter.com/TXFMDublin/status/7 ... 4376083457.
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"Financial Times" review is not always opens for free, so here's the text:

Spoiler! :

The latest album by the ‘art-rock activist’ sees the world as a grim, unsettling place.


“Getting back to the political question,” PJ Harvey told an interviewer in 1992, the year she released her first album Dry, “I feel un­comfortable with myself at the moment because I feel I’m neglecting that side. I’m not concerned enough about things. I seem to be getting caught up in just being very inward-looking, which I don’t like in myself.”

Harvey was 22 when she spoke those words. Already this most serious-minded of rock musicians was struggling to work out the relationship between her private and public life, how far Polly Jean Harvey overlapped with PJ Harvey, her neutrally named stage self. Almost 25 years later, the issue resurfaces on her new album, The Hope Six Demolition Project.

In the 1990s, Harvey’s public-private dilemma was played out in the pages of the UK music press, which insisted on interpreting her dark, flaying songs as memoir and speculating about eating disorders and breakdowns. Harvey’s response was to invent a range of personas, such as the gothic siren of To Bring You My Love and the cosmopolitan sensation-seeker of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea.

Her profile grew, capped by Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea winning the 2001 Mercury Prize, but a dead end loomed. Was there a way out from the twin ruts of theatricality and confession? Must it be one or the other? The path forward lay in a turn to politics.

The 2011 album Let England Shake marked the breakthrough, a carefully researched, deeply felt series of songs about a century of warfare, from Gallipoli to Afghanistan. Harvey sang them in a voice without character: “purely the narrator, like the printed word, just the black and white, just telling the story”, she told the FT at the time. Her presence in the songs would require neither personas nor autobiography. “I’m not putting forward my own opinion, but you’ll probably find it in the spaces in between,” she explained.

Let England Shake won Harvey the Mercury Prize for the second time and turned her into an art-rock activist. She appeared on television with David Cameron, challenging him over arts funding cuts, and guest-edited an edition of Today, the BBC’s flagship current affairs radio programme. “Leftwing claptrap,” a Conservative MP fulminated. A Labour counterpart compared her politics to the leaders of Iran, Syria and Russia.

The insults continue with the arrival of her new album. “She’s to music what Piers Morgan is to cable news,” a Washington DC local politician complained this month, upset by The Hope Six Demolition Project’s portrayal of a DC neighbourhood as a blasted urban badland. Harvey has not responded: she has disappeared from sight in the run-up to the record’s release.

Her promotional invisibility is at odds with the unusually open way in which she made the album. The Hope Six Demolition Project was recorded last year at Somerset House in London as an art installation that members of the public could observe through glass walls. On the day I visited, Harvey and her musicians were rehearsing “Chain of Keys”, a saxophone-led funeral march about an old woman living in a deserted village.

Albums are normally recorded in private and publicised on release. Harvey’s reversal of the usual order suggests that playing music is a social activity but interpreting it is personal. The musician who once said she had “a huge desire to be in control of everything” wants to delineate where her role as a public figure begins and ends.

But The Hope Six Demolition Project proves too unstable for such purposes. Wider-ranging and less coherent than Let England Shake, it is based on Harvey’s trips to Afghanistan, Kosovo and Washington DC with the photographer Seamus Murphy, with whom she published a book of poetry and photos last year.

The 11 tracks sketch a grim world of poisoned rivers, ruined buildings, war and poverty. Striking images abound. A Ferris wheel with children morphs into a sinister wheel of fortune. A child beggar asks for a dollar, mournfully sung by Harvey to sound like “dolour”. Several songs have a loose, blaring quality as though recording the blaze of synapses at a strange and unsettling sight, with Harvey’s voice high above the instruments, an observer bearing witness.

“Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln” plunges messily into the action, vocals and instruments striking up without introduction. “The Ministry of Social Affairs” makes superb use of an old blues sample, building up tension when we expect it to be released, climaxing with wild sax solos. There are no neat resolutions.

It ends with “Dollar, Dollar”, a numbed lament about meeting the beggar that finds Harvey “trapped inside a car”, assailed by guilt as she fails to hand over money. A melancholy sax plays as the boy’s skeletal face haunts her through the glass window. It is not looking inward that leaves Harvey feeling uncomfortable about herself any more — it is the act of looking outwards.

[Kuk91]

http://www.theartsdesk.com/new-music/pj ... on-project

The only useful line from this review (which contains at least two factual mistakes, by the way) is " ...it marks the first time that my pre-release copy of an album has come with a lyric booklet <...>".

[Kujjj]

When the reviewer makes mistakes like saying an album from 2001 is from 2003, you can pretty much know the review isn't going to be winning an award for journalism of the year. Most, if not all the negative reviews are pretty much saying the music is making them feel uncomfortable.

[Blackie]

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