Recommendations of the Editorial team
A record that begins like this is most likely a great record: “Here’s the Hope Six Demolition Project/ Stretching down to Benning Road/ A well-known pathway of death (at least, that’s what I’m told)/ Here’s the one sit-down restaurant in Ward Seven. Nice.”
Polly Harvey sings this in a simple, somewhat American, anthemic, catchy song that could come from the sixties or by Bruce Springsteen, who has it from the sixties. PJ Harvey does a site visit: “Here’s the old mental institution/ Now the Homeland Security base.” And at the end, a chorus repeats with false emphasis: “The Community of Hope/ They’re gonna put a Walmart there.”
PJ Harvey, the Englishwoman who made England tremble, brings no new news to the New World. Randy Newman made a record about the South, “Good Old Boys”and David Byrne directed the 1986 film “True Stories” about small-town America, and on “Naked”the Talking Heads’ latest album, he describes how nature is swallowing up all the parking lots, shopping malls and Walmarts, and pansies are growing over what was civilization.
Perverted marching songs
But Harvey goes to even more interesting places, and her concise impressionistic inventories are reinforced, commented on and counteracted by eerie and ironic music, scorning the scorn with poisonous intelligence and caustic melancholy.
She goes to the places of terror and destruction, through a desolate country of wars and devastation, she sees the signs on the wall: “This is the Ministry of Defense/ The stairs and walls are all that’s left/ Mortar holes let through the air/ Kids do the same thing everywhere/ They’ve sprayed graffiti in Arabic/ And balanced sticks in human shit.” The sticks in the shit: Polly Harvey has found the one image that captures both – the despair and the carrying on, the essence and the decay.
“Near The Memorials To Lincoln And Vietnam” is not ostensibly about these monuments at all. It’s about a boy who acts as if he wanted to throw something to the sparrows to eat by making a throwing motion. But his hands are empty. And people walk across the grass and squeeze into plastic chairs. In addition, Polly Harvey has children’s choirs sing as if on a school trip. Two paragraphs of truth.
A deep-sounding saxophone tears apart many songs that are based in the blues, that sound like perverted marching songs, like war dances, like gospel, like children’s counting dances. Pure genius.
