PJ Harvey’s seventh album, Let England Shake, is her grand statement about war and its psychological toll on her homeland. For a grand statement, though, it’s mighty ambiguous. In a girlish, incongruously chipper voice, Harvey sings about the horrors of battlebanks that run red with blood, orphaned children, soldiers that “fall like lumps of meat, blown and shot out beyond belief”but she stops short of explicitly condemning war. She narrates several tracks from the trenches, romanticizing fallen soldiers and their cause, singing of her mother country with unconditional love. When she pines for her homeland on “The Last Living Rose,” she cites not just its glistening waterfronts but also its squalid back alleys. To love England is to love both; that's easy. Reconciling that national pride, however, with an awareness of the casualties and injustices that shaped this sacred country is far more difficult. There’s little judgment here, just a tangle of conflict and grief.
Let England Shake is a remarkable literary achievement, but first and foremost it’s an exhilarating romp. For every unabashedly chilling track, there are two or three plucky, even merry, counterparts. These songs are loose and incessantly rhythmic, performed primarily on the autoharp, a rudimentary string instrument that leaves her arrangements plenty of room to breathe. Harvey fills the empty space with surprises: left-field saxophones, plumes of reverb, a galloping xylophone on the title track, a snippet of Niney the Observer’s reggae song “Blood & Fire” on “Written on the Forehead,” a harrowing sample of an Arabic wail on “England.” Taken alone, some of these cues are flagrantly obviousnone more than the ridiculous bugle on “The Glorious Land”but collectively, along with Harvey's often contradictory narrative voice, they confuse any single easy interpretation of the album. Bucking the conventions of most every war-themed record of the last eight years, Let England Shake isn't a polemic. It's a puzzle.
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