After a seven-year break from my all-time favourite artist, I feel positively spoiled with a brand new album and comprehensive collection of rarities, demos and other bits and bobs.
I Inside the Old Year Dying
One of the best things about being a PJ Harvey fan is not having a slightest clue what her next album is going to sound like. Her last record, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, was perhaps the most unsurprising album she’s ever made, and even that one is still distinctive enough to not feel like a retread. Now, with album no. 10, she once again has crafted something completely different from the rest of her discography.
The album’s closest earlier musical cousin is White Chalk, at the time a radical, polarising record even in a career full of reinventions, and in particular its haunting eponymous track dedicated to Dorset, the county in England where Polly Jean was raised. On I Inside the Old Year Dying, she goes back to Dorset and what I presume are the memories of her own rural upbringing to create a strange, hallucinatory world, where ordinary seasonal rhythms, farm chores and youthful sexual awakenings are mixed in with pagan mysticism and set against sparse, ambient musical backdrop of folk instruments and electronic flourishes.
The most startling and unexpected thing here is the lyrics, heavy on references to nature and sprinkled with the nearly-forgotten old Dorset dialect: wordle (world), gurrel (girl), tree-tears (leaves), drisk (a fine, wind-driven mist). I had my lyrics booklet to help me make a bit more sense of the enigmatic narrative about a year in a life of a young girl. Even without knowing their meaning, these archaic words are so rich and evocative, and help pull you inside the feverish folk dream that is hard to decode even with the glossary. It is almost disorienting to then come across lyrics like In her satchel Pepsi fizz, peanut-and-banana sandwiches that yank you right back into the modern world. There’s also a mystical, spectral figure named Wyman-Elvis, a blend of Christ and The King, that seems to signal the girl’s awakening, sexual as well as spiritual.
It’s hard to pick a favourite on the album that works more successfully as one cohesive piece, but August moves me with its lyrics that beautifully sum up a basic human desire while name-checking Elvis: ‘Vore I leave / someone please / Love Me Tender / ‘neath the trees. The song has another thing I’d never expect to hear on a PJ Harvey album in million years, a guest vocal appearance from Ben Whishaw of the new Q fame!
As of now I have no idea where I Inside the Old Year Dying will settle as far as my PJ album rankings go, but colour me enchanted and bewitched. There’s something intoxicating about its disquieting, otherworldly atmosphere, both ancient and new, woven from the vivid lyrics, eerie instrumentation and PJ continuing to push her upper register to and past its limits.
B-Sides, Demos & Rarities
A no-frills title for exactly what it says on the cover, a 59-song compilation of non-album tracks and obscurities that is a godsend to a diehard fan. I love the new album, but it’s also fun to go back and retrace PJ’s musical career, marked by uncompromising intensity and unwillingness to repeat herself. From a blues-howling banshee to an almost-mainstream rock queen to an ethereal chanteuse, this is a sort of an alternative history told through the songs that, for whatever reason, were relegated to the basement.
A few picks here were already familiar to me from a couple of rarities compilations I do own, but the bulk of the collection was an uncharted territory. As expected, some tracks are absolute gems and some were left off major releases for a good reason. I had fun guessing which era every track came from!
Highlights for me included the sad and plaintive Who Will Love Me Now, made with PJ’s long-time collaborator John Parish; Memphis, a heartfelt tribute to Jeff Buckley from the Stories From the City… era; the demo version of Cat on the Wall that’s actually a massive improvement on my least favourite PJ song; The Big Guns Called Me Back Again, a cut that comes unmistakably from the autoharp-led Let England Shake times. The Northwood is a fantastically atmospheric, nightmarish sketch that I wished was actually developed into a full song.
On the WTF end of spectrum, there’s a bizarre upbeat track called Why D’ya Go To Cleveland? that sounds like it was recorded as a joke, with PJ hamming it up like there’s no tomorrow; it is at least hilarious to listen to. The random, sombre and rather anaemic cover of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand is unfortunately a lot less exciting than I was hoping for.
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