PJ Harvey Finds Another New Sound

Musician Polly Jean Harvey, better known to the world as the illustrious PJ Harvey, has a persistent affection for change. Since she came on the scene in the early '90s, Harvey has reinvented both her appearance and her musical sound for each of the eight records that she has released. Let England Shake took four years to complete and was released on Valentine's Day of this year.

Harvey approached a new method of composition for this album in which she focused on writing the lyrics to the tracks before assigning them to song. The resulting politically focused tracks are fresh ground for Harvey.

The poetic, overtly political lyrics of this album are paired with well-written meter. If listeners harken only to the upbeat jingles but listen not to PJ's language, they might entirely miss Harvey's macabre messages on imperialism, pugnacity and armed conflict. The album opens with a cheering melody laced with the lines, "The West's asleep / Let England shake, weighed down with silent dead / I fear our blood won't rise again." The words are like a radical prayer that leaks from the porous wooden walls behind which a musician writes her euphonic memorandum; only Harvey does not work alone. The Lady Artiste wants to unite according proclamations of injustice, so she integrates other apposite voices into her songs by skillfully sampling tracks of activism past.

By taking loan of previously written songs and sounds which share Harvey's anti-war and anti-violences message, the record delivers a timeless collective voice. The "Reveille" military bugle mingles with electrical frequencies from her guitar, and the title track originally incorporated the Four Lads' "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," a song about the unnecessary name-change name of the Roman capital city. While the appropriated sample was removed for the record version of the track, videos of Harvey performing the original edition can be found online.