PJ Harvey – 'Let England Shake' retrospective review
Let England Shake has become such a symbolic record over the past 11 months that at times it’s difficult to remember that it was, first and foremost, a piece of music. After all, in the year of the Arab Spring and escalating crisis of confidence in the West’s economic supremacy, PJ Harvey’s paean to the horror of the First World War, and the questions it posed about the developed world’s state of civilisation, became an almost uncomfortably apt soundtrack. The album has assumed importance almost by accident of release date – despite being written over the past five years, here we suddenly had one of the UK’s most consistently thoughtful, creative and distinctive voices delivering a state-of-the-nation address when it was most needed. Accordingly, during the course of its promotion, Harvey performed its songs in front of two different Prime Ministers on Andrew Marr’s Sunday sofa; coincidentally, it was released on the very same day that Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian government was overthrown.
Let England Shake’s symbolism makes it an important album. What makes it our album of the year, though, is that it’s also a brilliant piece of music. For a start it’s curiously accessible – curious, that is, for a record heavy on the death and destruction themes and from a woman whose back catalogue has a penchant atonal string quartet arrangements and production advice from Captain Beefheart. But where previous PJ Harvey albums have been easier to admire than to love, Let England Shake is a joy: from the dive-straight-in opening bars of the title track, there are earworms aplenty, delicately swooping melodies and epic, evocative guitars. It’s also a deeply immersive record, in which Harvey uses musical devices as well as lyrics to tell her stories – the lone trumpeter on The Glorious Land, out of time in every sense, blasting a battle cry while the rest of the track soldiers on is a spine-tingling and inspired metaphor for the oblivion of war.
But while Let England Shake is undeniably a record with serious things to say, it saves itself from over-earnestness by also being almost ghoulishly witty from time to time. When Harvey borrows Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues for the coda of The Words That Maketh Murder, by far the album’s most gruesome song, the question of “what if I take my problems to the United Nations” abruptly dislocates the line from its throwaway origins. Equally, the use of an addictively funky ska track to underpin Written On The Forehead’s bleak story of a city under siege is deliciously macabre, and, crucially, lifts the record’s mood ahead of its final funeral march.
And it’s this sort of versatility that is Let England Shake’s true triumph. While the album has won deserved praise throughout the year for being the “definitive war album” – a sort of musical companion to Wilfred Owen’s poetry or Apocalypse Now – and may be remembered as such in the future, it should not be forgotten what a richly complex, diverse and bold musical achievement it is too.
