'Let England Shake' - PJ Harvey

In the New Yorker Sasha Frere-Jones has a decidedly damning-with-faint-praise review of Let England Shake, Polly Jean Harvey's latest album, but he manages to stumble on something insightful, namely the Corscombe siren's career-long shift from singing from the viscera to composing from the head. This is partly true: PJ herself has talked (to that international arts journal The Bridport News) about the primacy of words in Let England Shake, of words coming first and then having the music fitted around them - which, it has to be said, results in some very odd song structures indeed. But even her early output, from the abandoned woman of 'Sheela-na-Gig' onwards, so apparently gutsy and instinctive, in fact involved the adoption of a series of masks. You could never be quite sure where the singer's approval rested, where gender lines lay, what, exactly, was going on. Despite all the attention given to the political and historical elements of Let England Shake, nothing is any clearer, which is what makes it all the more compelling.

Take, for instance, the heartbreaking evocation of somebody's England, 'The Last Living Rose'. 'Goddamn Europeans!' spits the singer to start off, completely unconvincingly on any level; 'Take me back to beautiful England' - an England whose 'beauty' is described in images of rain, rot, and waste. What is being condemned and what approved here? If anything, it's about the impossibility of love, the longing for home and distress at what home has become; or, perhaps instead of distress, we should read perverse, defiant endorsement. Everything is ambiguity. The much-discussed war-inspired pieces, even those that seem to relate to Afghanistan, are so decontextualised, so reduced to an experience, a feeling, that it's impossible to know where we are treading exactly. Each snippet of emotion is made simultaneously tiny and universal. It is nothing else than PJ Harvey has always done, though the keynote here is distance, reflection, rather than visceral immediacy. She uses again the high, thin voice she first showcased on White Chalk, and plays her usual games with instruments she doesn't really know very well: her description of herself as an artist rather than a musician is very accurate (just as well she can attract such proficient musicians to work with her). Both these serve to distance the emotion from the expression. Yet what pictures she manages to paint. Let England Shake is a series of drownings, losses, seen through veils of mist. Like the Dorset coast.