PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (2011)

PJ Harvey celebrated the release of their tenth studio album with a Live show from Paris you could stream on Internet, and the best way to get into an LP is by listen it live, there’s something about the energy and the emphasis that the artist can do live that can be hard to show on the studio record. But live show aside, is amazing how PJ Harvey passes from one record to another never giving up experimentation, eccentricity, weirdness, creativity and quality, a trademark that has endured the years.

Now on a more specific note, Let England Shake is by far the darkest album of PJ Harvey and her band, with very political and drastic lyrics, for sure people will have a hard time getting into the content and in time we’ll be capable of revealing the messages hidden into the entire concept. Of course darkness is a constant of the theme but the feeling is very global, war, death, violence, murder, without leaving behind the fantastic instrumentation with each song, carefully putted together.

It’s hard to say if the genius of this album will be shattered by its weirdness, but if one thing is sure, this record is both, genius and weird, hard to digest but like everything weird, take some time to settle, but I’m sure that once the weirdness is settled the other half will still remain, the genius part, that will still give you something to think about long time from now.

I would say that Harvey is not only shaking England but taking every fan around from storm with this hardcore dense LP, for sure revealing yet another Harvey that delivers consistency into inconsistency, or order inside the chaos. Even with the straight forward songwriting and the internal discourse is not something intentionally made in the LP by itself, it takes part in the interpretation of the listener, a history is told but the meaning is intentionally giving to the one that is in presence of it, there for the album has no complete meaning until the interpretation; this is not a weak thing, it just makes it more a piece of art that reaches objective meaning in a subjective reading, like every piece of modern art, misunderstood by a lot of people, judged harshly but never disposable.

Tracklist:

1. Let England Shake
2. The Last Living Rose
3. The Glorious Land
4. The Words That Maketh Murder
5. All and Everyone
6. On Battleship Hill
7. England
8. In The Dark Places
9. Bitter Branches
10. Hanging In The Wire
11. Written On The Forehead
12. The Colour Of The Earth

Rate: 9.3/10

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