PJ Harvey Let England Shake

PJ Harvey marches into the fog of war
By Matt Ashare
Here, on this side of the Atlantic, we tend to see the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan through the shattered lens of the Viet Nam experience or as a new and singularly American effort to rid the world of terrorism. Those are our stories and we’re sticking to them. But there are other narratives, and in her latest incarnation, as a spectral avant-folk seer on Let England Shake, the polymorphic Polly Jean Harvey picks up on a peculiarly British strain of sorrow and loss that takes her all the way back to the First World War, specifically the notoriously disastrous amphibious invasion of Gallipoli.
    “Death was everywhere,” Harvey intones darkly against a diffuse backdrop of oddly-tuned autoharp and strummed guitar on “All and Everyone,” a song that references Bolton’s Ridge (a Gallipoli landmark) and draws much of its power from its first person, on-the-beach perspective — “As we advanced into the sun/Death was all and everyone.” The plaintive and poetic “Battleship Hill” is named for another relic of Gallipoli. Only here Harvey’s in the present, her plaintive yet proud voice floating gently above “caved in trenches” as her longtime partners in crime, Mick Harvey (a former member of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, and no relation to PJ) and John Parrish, arrive with a quietly skiffling beat, gently propulsive guitar, and a disquieting descending piano figure.
    Let England Shake is more than just a history lesson set to music. The disc’s ominous title track and opener finds a puckish and strangely playful high-voiced Harvey writing what might be a letter to a friend at war overseas: “England’s dancing days are done/Another day, Bobby, for you to come home/And tell me indifference won.” And on “The Last Live Rose,” one of the more immediately accessible, guitar-driven songs on an album that parcels out its pleasures, Harvey descends into a more familiar vocal range for a “walk through the stinking alleys” of London that could have taken place yesterday or years ago.
    This isn’t an easy album. It’s shot through with discomfiting images of fallen bodies, severed limbs, and, well, death, death, death. There are times when Harvey gets a little too creative — the bugle call that interrupts the flow of “The Glorious Land” isn’t pleasantly jarring, just jarring. But Harvey is smart to mine the past. It’s a device that allows her to march through the fog of our current wars without succumbing to self-righteous polemic. By placing herself in the center of the action in a song like “The Words That Maketh Murder,” she lands on the right side of a soldier who’s on the wrong side of history. “I’ve seen and done things I want to forget,” she sings plainly, “I seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat/Blown and shot out beyond belief/Arms and legs were in the trees.” As William Tecumseh Sherman unapologetically put it, “War is hell.”