PJ Harvey remains in a league of her own.
Out of the 20th century, who could a non-conformist female musician see as a role model?
Could it be Sister Rosetta Tharpe? Patti Smith? Kate Bush? If things were all her way, it certainly wouldn’t have been Polly Jean Harvey, the art-school polymath who emerged around the same time as grunge but has spent a subsequent career smashing mirrors and forever changing course.
PJ Harvey’s last album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, appeared to buck that trend at least in the making, as the singer offered a rare demystification of the recording process to anyone who wanted to watch from the other side of some one-way glass.
Since then, other than working on a handful of film and TV scores, any window into her life has returned to its normal opaque self – a state where interviews remain at a premium, explanations even more so.
This leads to I Inside The Old Year Dying; a taut, strange record for our constantly unsettling times. The accompanying narrative relates to a 12-year-old girl (Ira-Abel) living in rural Dorset and a series of largely allegorical experiences she shares along with characters such as the messianic Wyman-Elvis. Adapted from a book of PJ Harvey’s poems, these richly dark tales contain also smatterings of an archaic dialect – the lyrics to come with selected translations.
If at this point you’re thinking that very few artists could get away with what could be such a willingly self-indulgent construct, you’re correct, but recorded as live with long term collaborators Flood and creative partner John Parish, and with the goal of firewalling the material from any known past, the results are never less than compelling. As the imagination wanders there also are even moments of borderline enchantment, if not in a strictly fairytale way.
The first couple of tracks – opener Prayer At The Gate and Autumn Term – form an odd kind of prelude. Here we’re introduced to the mysterious central character in a tangential way, as if speaking, and also to the ancient sounding vernacular, ‘And drisk shrouded in its cloak/holway, river, brook and oak’, both examples of ancient folk as you might imagine is/was played inside stone circles.
These are followed by a remarkable sequence of music that lies at the album’s centre. Lwonesome Tonight bubbles up from the album’s ‘Sonic netherworld’, its lo-fi synths and acoustic loneliness recalling Tunng, PJ Harvey’s voice soaring, the subject an Elvis-Jesus to be worshipped heretically with just, ‘…Pepsi fizz/Peanut-and-banana sandwiches/For this man her shepherd is’.
Maybe not with any deliberation it assumes the job of maypole, with the rest of the material capering around it. Here the underplayed boogie of Seem An I is the closest we get to PJ Harvey’s previous incarnations, and The Nether-edge is like a discarded Boards Of Canada piece after being hijacked and reborn with a chalk-downed soul.
The title-track, meanwhile, draws a direct link between the sprite we believe her to be and the disciples – Jehnny Beth, Anna Calvi et al – inspired by it.
The rest alternates between light and darkness, such that by the landslide like knotty closer A Noiseless Noise there is a sensation of things folding back into their former pattern; her fate unresolved, the final exhortations to Ira-Abel are: “Go home now love/leave your wandering.”
Will Polly Jean Harvey be your role model? Only if you commit to never wanting one, or vow not to repeat any of her actions. I Inside The Old Year Dying is a record made by someone uninterested in comparisons, and there will be few like it this or any year.
For that alone it should be welcomed and admired.
