Send "PJ Harvey " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 "The West's asleep," PJ Harvey declares on the first line of her new album, Let England Shake, before spending the next 40 minutes aiming to shame, frighten, and agitate it into action. When Polly Jean Harvey burst into the public consciousness in the early 90s, her gravely voice, outsized personality, and often disturbing lyrics gave the alt-rock world a crucial shot of excitement. That early work is still among the most raw and real guitar music to emerge from the past few decades, so no surprise, it's a version of PJ Harvey a lot of people still miss. But if you've paid attention to her in the years since, the one thing you can expect is that she won't repeat herself.On Let England Shake, Harvey is not often upfront or forceful; her lyrics, though, are as disturbing as ever. Here, she paints vivid portraits of war, and her sharp focus on the up-close, hand-to-hand devastation of World War I-- depicting "soldiers falling like lumps of meat"-- provides a fitting setting for today's battlegrounds. From the Zombies to the Pogues, artists have often gravitated to the confused, massive loss of life of the Great War. If it doesn't resonate as much in America as it does in Europe-- and it doesn't-- that's more our fortune than our shame. The Great War remains a rich and resonant subject for art because it briefly caused the world to step back, aghast and afraid to look at what it had done. The collective trauma of World War I did indeed shake England, specifically, out of the end of its imperialistic Victorian stupor. The rest of the world gasped as well: WWI hastened the Russian Revolution, coaxed the U.S. into isolationism and a flirtation with pacifism, and set the tone for a shunned Germany to embrace the Third Reich. Culturally, the result was modernism, dadaism, and surrealism continuing to overtake the giddiness of la belle époque; geopolitically, it redrew European borders, creating roughly a dozen new nations; diplomatically, the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, was meant to prevent war, at least on this scale, from ever happening again....full text |
| Guardian |
| As befits its title, there is a whole lotta shaking going on on PJ Harvey's eighth album. First to quake is the assumption that Polly Harvey is foremost an artist of the interior, mapping the jagged peaks of desire and the boggy ground of memory. Let England Shake leaves behind the haunted psycho-geography of Harvey's native Dorset, rendered so exquisitely on her last album, White Chalk, and deploys her to an entirely new arena. Over the course of a dozen songs, she examines war, its human cost and her beloved England's role as aggressor and saviour, haven and purgatory. Buy it from Buy the CD PJ Harvey Let England Shake (Limited Edition Digipack) Island 2011 Even if Harvey disavows a political motive, you would call this a protest record. After all, Harvey did premiere the title track on The Andrew Marr Show in front of Gordon Brown – lest we forget, the bankroller of the Iraq war and the man accused of ill-equipping British forces in Afghanistan. But rather than agitating, Harvey concentrates on bearing witness to armed conflict, from the Gallipoli slaughter of the first world war to the present day. She notes the arms and legs in the trees, the colour of blood on sand and the scent of thyme on the wind all commingling. Her point is unmistakable – war is both abhorrent and endlessly recurring. But Let England Shake is magnificently ambivalent about her own native soil. Track two, "The Last Living Rose", hymns an England that isn't too far from Peter Doherty's Albion, extolling "the grey damp filthiness of ages/And battered books/And fog rolling down behind the mountains/On the graveyards of dead sea-captains". On the next track, "The Glorious Land", England no longer shakes to the age-old rumble of the plough, but the thunder of tanks practising manoeuvres. "Oh! America! Oh! En-ger-land!" she sings, exasperated at the entwined aggressive destinies of her musical homeland and her physical one. Harvey's music started out as a kind of spiky, post-Beefheart blues, but this song finds her taking firm root in the English folk tradition....full text |
| Bbc |
| The title of Polly Harvey’s seventh album, 2007’s White Chalk, seemed to address England’s psycho-geography by way of Dover’s iconic coastline. Perhaps that’s projection. But her eighth most definitely does. It’s a concept album, folks. Songtitles include The Last Living Rose, England and The Glorious Land, with a distinct whiff of landscape and legend. A fragile Hanging in the Wire even namechecks "the white hills of Dover". Pete Doherty doesn’t have a copyright on singing about Albion, you know. Going by her latest photos, Harvey’s position as the alternative Lady Gaga, confounding expectations and changing hair styles at each turn, remains undiminished. This time, the black gown and headpiece screams Hel, the Norse God of the dead. And when you read the lyric sheet, death fair stares you in the face. Its first words are "Let England shake / Weighed down with silent dead"; The Last Living Rose sings of "the grey damp filthiness of ages," and it turns out "the glorious fruit of our land" is "orphaned children". Add various references – Battleship Hill, Bolton Ridge, the Anzac trench – to the disastrous Allied invasion of Galipoli, Turkey in World War One and we appear to have a psycho-geographic lament around the perils of colonialism and the ravages of war that resonate right up to the present. As a backdrop to this brutal battlefield, Harvey has shifted from White Chalk’s gaunt piano ballads to a broader sound that is no less feverish and close to the bone. Imagine a minimalist take on her debut album Dry’s folk-blues tilt, all urgent and wiry rhythm. It’s recorded mostly live with multi-instrumental support from the long-serving John Parrish and (former Bad Seed) Mick Harvey. But there are subtle additions; the signature horse’n’ hounds bugle leading the hunt is woven into a shifty The Glorious Land, the Bulgarian women’s choral wail (shouldn’t that be Turkish?) on the otherwise skeletal England. There is a playful reference to Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues via "what if I take my troubles to the United Nations?" into a skiffle-shaped The Words That Maketh Murder; but this is categorically a sad, despairing album. It ends with The Colour of the Earth, where a host of male voices (including the band) and Polly recall a soldier cut down in action and now "nothing but a pile of bones"....full text |
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