ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 14TH 2011
1YRON’S TOP 52 RECORDS OF 2011 RANKING: #1


The impact of Let England Shake on PJ Harvey’s career cannot be underestimated. At a time when the listenership of the Yeovil-born singer songwriter seemed to be gradually shrinking, it was unthinkable that something like a war record could catapult her artist back into the limelight to a position of unparalleled respect and honour. The sublime White Chalk, this record’s predecessor, was released three and a half years prior to a nation of music lovers seemingly dissatisfied with Polly’s recent career trajectory (Uh-Huh Her hardly ranks amongst her masterpieces). Its calcified themes of bleak, hill-top isolation and Miss Havisham-esque misery made for some disturbing, often uneasy listening. White Chalk is emotional starvation and by no means the kind of record to expand one’s audience with. Yet make no mistake, these aren’t the concerns of the artist and she has never made music to appease anyone. If anything, taking Let England Shake into perspective, her output has actually improved in quality over time. Dry and Rid Of Me showcased a remarkably unique talent, but it’s the diversity of Harvey’s persona, shifting with each release to incorporate the strength of her previous records with something different each time that has kept her relevant whilst many of her contemporaries have waxed and waned.


Harvey has constantly expressed a need to never repeat herself, and Let England Shake is a grand departure from anything that preceded it. It’s remarkable when someone like Harvey (who has never actually released a bad record in the twenty years that she’s been making them) produces what is now considered by many to be her best. Musically, it’s built upon a rich instrumental palette thanks to her adoption of the autoharp, allowing her the chance to convey a wide breadth of sound and filling these songs with a tragic, poetic beauty. The sparse transparency of White Chalk’s piano-based vulnerability is taken as a foundation for Shake, building upon those glass-shattering vocal cries and that paranoid mindset to a point where Harvey is continually looking outward. What has come to be the main focal point of discussion around Shake since its release is its powerful subject matter, and Harvey’s response to the socio-political conditions of the world we live in today offset in her a deep-rooted exploration of her own nation’s tumultuous history. Citing the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Pinter as initial influences, Harvey began to delve further by reading war letters, as well as more oblique references such as the art of Dalí and Goya (it’s hard to imagine the latter’s Disasters Of War series having not crossed her path at least once). Military conflicts such as the Gallipoli Campaign and Constantinople also take root, forming the basis of Harvey’s fixed vantage point.


The First World War is Harvey’s calling card for reference points, and this could be down to the way in which conscription was depicted as glamorous and incredibly patriotic. The First World War, such was its position in the progression of industrial technologies, also ensured men fought face to face instead of inside tanks, from the sea, or air, for example. Where the record really excels is in Harvey’s ability to offset the heavy lyrical imagery with the jaunty, often marching nature of the music. On The Glorious Land, bugle calls puncture an established procession of guitars as Harvey questions the foundation of her nation’s ancestry. The world view of England is often one of peaceful tranquility, of apple orchards and exquisite dinner parties and formal evening wear, and yet it is also a powerful nation with a history of bloodshed, merciless battles and gruesome victories. So when Harvey sings, “What is the glorious fruit of our land? The fruit is deformed children,” it’s paired with a mutual reverence and disgust for an island that has fought so many wars on so many different fronts (often simultaneously) yet at an unspeakable cost to human life.


Whether referring to the white chalk hills that will likely rot her bones or constructing bleak portraits through Angelene, Catherine, Elise or Leah, Harvey has frequently used her nationality to ground her music in a decidedly English tradition. Throughout Shake, this passion is greatly intensified; on The Last Living Rose, she berates ‘goddamn Europeans’ through a homesick love cry for ‘beautiful England’ before wandering down stinking alleys past the glistening Thames path. Elsewhere, on the skeletal England, Harvey lives and dies through the country she adores in what is essentially a love poem to the land that has shaped the woman she is today. A dramatic sense of urgency in Harvey’s words is nothing new; she has always been a provocateur, seeking to unnerve and stimulate in equal measure. The material of her early career was more suggestive and much aligned to the brooding sexuality of a young woman on tracks like Dress or Rub ‘Til It Bleeds. Twenty years later, Harvey is more concerned with how the brutality of war and human suffering can impact in similarly unnerving ways. It says a lot about not only the shifting world we live in but what Harvey deems significant and relevant to be discussing. On The Words That Maketh Murder, she sings from a perspective that feels a little too close for comfort. Lines like “Soldiers fell like lumps of meat” and “Flesh quivering in the heat” are as raw as open wounds yet her vocal delivery is one of shellshocked immobility. There’s nothing she can do, nothing anyone can do, nothing even the United Nations can do, and it’s a point she drives through repeatedly. On All And Everyone she sings about the futility of death from Bolton’s Ridge, an eyewitness account of the horror and tragedy of the beach front attack on the Gallipoli penninsula in 1915. Through rising autoharp, a chilling guitar riff and on to a lagging horn section intended to convey the disorientation of battle, Harvey’s lyrical imagery is bolstered by her perfect control of her choice instruments and lines such as “Death was everywhere” and “A bank of red earth,” subverting the perverse image of thousands of dead bodies “lying out there in the open air” into something deeply poetic.


The most effective use of the autoharp comes with the track On Battleship Hill with its daybreak introduction before settling into something much more sombre. Harvey deliberately sets her vocal in an upper register, twisting her tongue around astonishing lines such as “Jagged mountains jutting out, cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth.” She’s joined by John Parish and Mick Harvey at various points throughout the album and their vocal contributions add further realism to her storytelling. Perhaps it’s lazy to suggest that Parish and Harvey sing from the perspective of fallen soldiers or injured servicemen simply because they are men, but such imagery feels entirely appropriate given the balance between Polly’s position as a female protagonist. The words they sing always mimic that of Harvey’s so as to suggest that, indeed, these are the voices of such fallen soldiers echoing through the mire. It also places Harvey herself more directly in the situation she’s recreating, caught in the crossfire so as to bolster her connection with the listener. With On Battleship Hill, it’s bone-chilling how a remark like “Cruel nature has won again” turns into a ghostly riddle whilst retaining such a magnificent melody when two voices, as opposed to just one, are behind it.


As the record moves on it never loses it’s balance, and credit is due to Harvey for always believing that less is more. On Bitter Branches, soldiers are torn away from their wives while the imagery of twisted branches and the rambling roots of trees double as a perfect metaphor for yearning and longing, the desperate anticipation to wait for news that may never come. On paper, the lyrics of Shake are descriptive in the most literal sense. Harvey describes everything her eyes see, what her nose smells, what her ears hear and what her hands touch. It could end there, but the genius of the record lies in how she inflects these words with an emotional poignancy that connects the listener on such a level of intimacy by direct association. For forty minutes she stares the listener squarely in the eyes. Hanging In The Wire and Written On The Forehead are dreamier numbers which float in a state of surrealist rapture, but imagery of blood, fire, barbed wire and fetid rivers continually drive home the notion of despair. Through a craft that is earwormy in nature, these songs become endlessly repeatable. There’s a deep intricacy to everything here but also a very direct, forwardly momentum which simultaneously comforts in its familiarity and captivates in its documenting of life and death.


Throughout Shake, Harvey rummages around in the trenches beneath all obvious conclusions instead of lecturing about the nature of war or wagging her finger at the way in which current political conflicts are justified. Yes, war is bloody and futile. Yes, it’s stupid and pointless, and we haven’t learnt much after thousands of years of inflicting pain and suffering upon one another. As is to be expected of her stance, the roots of her questioning run much deeper to a point where she aims to connect the listener by boiling everything down to the idea of one man against another. Let England Shake is a modern classic a year after its release, that all too rare breed of album that demands respect and attention from all those who have come across it. I saw Harvey perform these songs at the Troxy in Limehouse a few weeks after the record’s release and again, eight months later, at the Royal Albert Hall. The difference was in how Harvey commanded her arrangements and how the audience responded to them. As the year was drawing to a close and these songs acquired a familiarity from entering into the recent past, Harvey appeared on stage like a war correspondent, as if arriving to tell stories of the horrors her eyes and ears had experienced. Her audience will always listen patiently, paying her a respect and attention that is very rare in contemporary music, for she has dared to seek out an aspect of humanity within all of us that has gone virtually untapped. Opening your heart to Let England Shake is what makes it so very special.