
(Island)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
I don't know if Let England Shake is the best rock LP ever made about World War I; believe it or not, it has at least one stiff competitor. But I know this -- it is a special and remarkable thing, a record of enough grace and intelligence to transcend any pop boundaries it brings with it, enough sophistication and passion to make any number of other brilliant and enjoyable songs and albums on the current landscape sound lacking, even silly. It sounds and feels like a classic, and potentially like a crown jewel in a two-year period crowded with exquisite albums, and all you want to do when it ends is hear it again.
Polly Jean Harvey's imagery in tackling the horrific loss of an entire generation in the Great War ("Weighted down with silent dead / I fear our blood won't rise again"), intermingling it with jabs of modern warfare, was informed by Eliot and Goya, by interviews with Iraq vets and stories of Gallipoli. (This review is accidentally timed with ANZAC Day. I honestly did not know until moments ago that April 25 was the anniversary.) But listening to the album conjures up cinematic images for me, the unforgiving, color-filtered bleakness of Elem Klimov's Come and See or the oppressively sparse disorientation of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, the oblique beauty of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or a book of Civil War battlefield photographs. All the same, as its brilliantly straightforward but poetic lyrics periodically suggest, these songs are made for a personal struggle, even as the fog of war permeates them.
The dichotomy, indeed, of this music's immense pleasures -- its addictive spaciousness and brevity -- and its cloud-covered darkness, akin to the work of Harvey's onetime lover Nick Cave, lends it much of its urgency, like the Velvet Underground's deliberately unresolved conflicts of reassurance and chaos. There are times when the music absolutely shimmers, occasionally just before it gives way to an all-encompassing (but no less stunning) dread; witness the deeply affecting pillow of comfort in "On Battleship Hill" falling away to stark dread. The title cut's twisted curiosity cheerfully invites a boy to descend into the bowels of "the fountain of death." This ingenious use of traditionalism reaches its peak on "The Words That Maketh Murder," morbidly bouncy traditional folk that -- along with much of the album -- evokes a modern spin on the sea chanty, or the murder ballad. No novelty, this, as it's most chilling: "Flies swarming everyone / Over the whole summit peak / Flesh quivering in the heat / This was something else again / I fear it cannot be explained." And by the time it quotes Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues," it's such a warm injection of humanity into the breathless story as to render it a rapturous rock & roll moment. Very seldom is this war music in any obvious fashion; even the songs that sort of march, like "Bitter Branches," do it upside down, and for all the warlord chanting on "Written on the Forehead," it feels in the end like a cry against the darkness.
The classicist music is playful as often as unsettling (current single "The Glorious Land" verges on new wave), but seldom lacks a vicious bite -- the wry quasi-national anthem "The Last Living Rose" sarcastically romanticizes ("Take me back to beautiful England / And the grey, damp filthiness of ages, and battered books") against a disturbing, claustrophobic performance. For all the airy precision and economy of the songs, for all their airtight composition, they are nothing without Harvey's bending, teasing, evocatively belted vocals. Nearly as striking, and just as vital to the album's success, is the male chorus of backing vocals provided by her band on several tracks, which adds a fascinating dimension and fills out the sound into something roomier, new, scary.
That voice, those backing voices, the sad brass, the watery foreboding, the easy humanist depth suggestive of Patti Smith at her peak, and alarming eloquence -- "We got up early / washed our faces / walked the fields / and put up crosses / Passed through the damned mountains / went hellwards / and some of us returned / and some of us did not" -- would be enough to make this a terrific mood piece, a turn-the-lights-out and have-a-drink-and-lament experience, but it's considerably more, for Harvey tops the grand achievement with a parade of memorable songs that don't even necessarily need the context, much as it enhances them. The electric guitar stab on the persuasively hushed "In the Dark Places" would have immediate impact regardless, and this holds true for everything, especially the shambolic, drama-building "England" (capturing a stirring double-track vocal by Harvey going mental) and the crushingly sad, haunting, vulnerable "Hanging in the Wire," its piano a note of gorgeous desperation, its words beyond hope:
Walker's in the wire
Limbs point upwards
There are no birds singing
The white cliffs of Dover
There are no trees to sing from
Walker cannot hear the wind
Far off symphony
To hear the guns beginning
The male chorus is used most effectively on "Words That Maketh Murder," potentially tied with "Hanging in the Wire" as the best cut, and the stirring folk eulogy "The Colour of the Earth," on which Harvey resigns herself to the background, as a mere bystander as the tale is told:
Louis was my dearest friend
Fighting in the ANZAC trench
Louis ran forward from the line
I never saw him again
Later in the dark
I thought I heard Louis' voice
Calling for his mother, then me
But I couldn't get to him
He's still up on that hill
20 years on that hill
Nothing more than a pile of bones
But I think of him still
If I was asked I'd tell
The colour of the earth that day
It was dull and browny red
The colour of blood, I'd say.