Where on previous efforts Polly Jean Harvey’s guitar (care of Rid of Me), organ (To Bring You My Love), and duet partner (Thom Yorke on Songs From The City…’ “This Mess We’re In”) grated in the most deliberate fashion, now it’s her high register. On White Chalk it and her untutored piano brought tension to harrowing material of uneven melodic strength; the album was the very definition of The Worthwhile Failure.
She finds the objective correlative for the vocal switch-off on Let England Shake, which, in sound and subject matter alone, is the most unusual album released in years. Since most musicians espouse a received leftism, this examination of English decline, mediated by an empathy with the death-steeped nature of the blues, at first sounds confused. Anchored by a mix that’s at once spare and dense (credit again to Harvey’s new vocal strategy), Let England Shake is more than half in love with easeful death, hard electric guitar strums, and lyrics about jagged mountains jutting out and bodies piled up in mounds. If the line sounds familiar, it serves as a reminder that Harvey’s experiment rests as much on what she’s learned about history via Dylan and other musics than any study of Churchill’s memoirs or Wilfred Owen poetry — her limitation too. What she reminds me most of is the Sinead O’Connor of “Troy” and “I Am Stretched On Your Grave,” of “A Prayer for England,” a collaboration with Massive Attack on their 100th Window album in which her blood-stained falsetto hovers over an electro landscape whose evocation of despair pales beside (a) its familiarity with sentiments far beyond its singer’s ken (b) its own strangeness. On the wordless introduction to “England,” Harvey answers her own keening with a playback of a harmony mimicking what sounds like a muezzin. Appropriate: the country that she loves boasts citizens whose bloodlines she can’t trace back to the Norman invasion (“people throwing dinars at the belly dancers,” she sings, or drops, or states as fact in “Written on the Forehead”).
In a career full of provocations and experiments, Let England Shake is PJ Harvey’s most provocative and experimental; yet if I hesitate in fully endorsing the album, blame Harvey’s reluctance to explain what exactly she misses about England. What does “England” mean to Polly Jean Harvey? Lamentations without cause aren’t her metier. Note the collaborators: still wedded to Nick Cave favorites Mick Harvey and John Parish’s conflation of darkness with significance, she coasts on the decay as if it was enough. Statements like “Bitter Branches” and “In the Dark Places” certainly are. But an album which requires as much from the listener as Let England Shake must offer more than hints and allegations, more than portents of doom. If she’s succeeded in pinning them down musically in 2011 — she really has never sung better, nor maneuvered through space this shrewdly — she’s still wedded to lyrical binaries incommensurate with her bandleading acumen. Remember that lame/cool Ric Ocasek lyric, “Alienation is the craze”? Let England Shake offers a lexicon’s worth — the “wave goodbye” refrain in “Bitter Branches” serves as envoi and motif. What Harvey has produced is a highbrow English version of The Suburbs, the Grammy-validated Arcade Fire album whose empathy for the kids who triumphed over middle class alienation didn’t compensate for the band’s implicit endorsement of the conditions that produced it; it’s a Geoffrey Hill audiobook. How it pained me to write that sentence.
