On her last album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, PJ Harvey tried her hand as a singing reporter seven years ago, reporting on her visits to social hotspots and war zones. The politicization of her deeply private and intimate art, which had seemed surprising and urgent on “Let England Shake” (2011), seemed strangely aimless and artificial.
A spun marvel, nature poetry and tandaradei
But there is probably no artist who knows better how to get out of such creative impasses by reducing her art back to the embers: her own story and her own body. This time she took a detour, through the countryside of her childhood in the southwest English county of Dorset. In the vernacular of that area, she wrote Orlam, a volume of poetry saturated with local myths and customs, in which she follows nine-year-old Ira in her fairytale West Country world.
And that’s where I Inside The Old Year Dying begins. Orlam, the forest spirit born of the eyeball of Ira’s beloved lamb, who sits on an elm tree, watches over life and death, past and present, in the first song. Birds chirp, ferns ripple, the ocean rages, a girl on the school bus with Pepsi and peanut and banana sandwiches in her satchel purses her lips: “Are you Elvis? Are you God?/ Jesus sent to win my trust?/ ‘Love Me Tender’ are his words/ As I have loved you, so you must…” Of course this is about the loss of innocence, it’s about love, and it is about God.
I Inside The Old Year Dying, which Harvey co-produced with John Parish and Flood, is a spun marvel, is nature lyric and tandaradei, is a ghost music of ancient words and eerie sounds, of folk, electronic and noise; of melodies that must have always been here, and many voices—whispered and hissed, pleaded and sung—that (almost) all originated with PJ Harvey. It’s simultaneously impenetrable and compelling, as if Scott Walker produced a ’90s comeback album by The Mamas & The Papas with the ghost of Mama Cass singing the harmonies. Love me tender.
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