When I first heard ‘The Community of Hope’, it struck me as
a hymn of praise to the determination of people to survive in a hard situation.
Notwithstanding the reaction to that song from some political quarters in the US, I still
rather think that. But the fact that it can be read in such violently divergent
ways is indicative of the way PJ Harvey’s latest album has been received more
generally. Reviewers have hit on entirely contradictory complaints as ways of
expressing their dissatisfaction: is she opening up too much? or not enough?
Harvey’s talent has always been expressed (as I’ve pointed
out before) through the adoption of masks: she is a ventriloquist, giving voice
to imaginary souls. Even the wartime vignettes of Let England Shake, inspired
though they may have been by the singer’s research, were works of the
imagination. Paradoxically, though, you can only pull this off if your adopted
voice makes contact with something inside you, and this gives an insight into
the problem people have with analysing Hope VI.
Because here she tries something new, something of an entirely different order – to jet across the world gathering material which reflects the
violence human beings work on each other, and to express it musically. The
trouble is that her usual talent of ventriloquy is of no use in this project.
To announce yourself as the John Pilger of Alternative Music (and Mr Pilger is
mentioned in the sleeve notes) is grandiose enough: to ventriloquise the
voices of the real, concrete people you may have met along the way would be
grotesque presumption, and Ms Harvey doesn’t try, falling back, for the most
part, on reportage and observation. Occasionally she takes words spoken to her
as the starting-point for a song – as with 'The Community of Hope', or 'A Line in the
Sand', which seems to hang around the statements of an aid worker in a refugee
camp (perhaps) – but that’s also reportage rather than an attempt to inhabit someone
else’s situation imaginatively.
Sometimes the observation she offers us is telling enough to
make an impact – the Kosovan woman still looking after her vanished neighbours’
houses in ‘Chain of Keys’*, or the horrific ruin described in ‘The Ministry of
Defence’, an image intensified by the brutality of the music that accompanies
it – and sometimes it’s not. Even the weakest tracks on the album have great
points of interest, such as the lovely lilt of ‘Medicinals’, almost like a
medieval carol; but the vision only seems to clear, and the music take off,
when Ms Harvey actually abandons reportage in favour of imaginative insight.
That happens in ‘The Community of Hope’, which juxtaposes its euphoric
title-line refrain against the bleak landscape of urban decay, and in ‘The
Wheel’, where a group of playing children inspires a meditation on violence and
loss which is both reticent and passionate. The points where she actually
speaks in her own, unmasked voice, virtually for the first time musically, are the least
successful of all. ‘Dollar Dollar’ describes an encounter with a boy beggar who
appears by the car in which the singer is travelling and which is then whisked
away before she can do anything: she finds it a haunting experience. There is
no mistaking the plaintive, pained quality in the vocal, but it’s not exactly a
startling insight, unless at 46 you’ve really never before experienced your own helplessness in the face of need.
Diamanda Galás once talked about the difference between an
artist wanting to speak and needing to speak: Hope VI is definitely the former.
Bits of it work, sometimes triumphantly, bits don’t, and its failures are, I
think, down to its author deliberately turning away from her own genius: an
absolutely bold, but not necessarily fruitful path to tread.
*The recording of chant from Decani monastery at the end places this in Kosovo; and I imagine the Father Sava referenced on the sleeve notes is Father Sava Janjic, Abbot of Decani and a leading voice for tolerance and reconciliation during the collapse of Former Yugoslavia and the period since.
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