The Sea and The Land

Words, ideas, photographs, music, history.

Posts tagged PJ Harvey

Jan 6

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

PJ Harvey, “The Last Living Rose”

$As album qua album, this probably outdoes anything else on my list for 2011. A bizarrely perfect match of sound to concept, Let England Shake creates a fractured image of war—mostly World War I—through a mixture of oddly off kilter English folk music and rock’n’roll. Harvey uses the sound of English folk songs to great and unnerving, effect. It serves as the recognizable, reassuring facade against which images of violence and destruction—narrated by Harvey’s singing, strangely high and clear, work against. Very few of the individual songs show the power the album really holds as a whole—yet the effect of all together slowly builds during the course of the album to create an image of a psychic landscape permanently crippled by violence.$

As album qua album, this probably outdoes anything else on my list for 2011. A bizarrely perfect match of sound to concept, Let England Shake creates a fractured image of war—mostly World War I—through a mixture of oddly off kilter English folk music and rock’n’roll. Harvey uses the sound of English folk songs to great and unnerving, effect. It serves as the recognizable, reassuring facade against which images of violence and destruction—narrated by Harvey’s singing, strangely high and clear, work against.

Very few of the individual songs show the power the album really holds as a whole—yet the effect of all together slowly builds during the course of the album to create an image of a psychic landscape permanently crippled by violence.