Ever since her off-kilter, quirky performance on BBC1’s ‘The Andrew Marr Show’ nearly a year ago, I was chomping at the bit for more news of her impending record. News that the Four Lads’ ‘Istanbul, not Constantinople’ sample had been dropped was quite sad, as I’d been finding myself singing it in Tesco randomly for quite a while. But the opening title track sets the tone for the rest of the album perfectly; the ghost of that sample is presented with the bittersweet xylophone melody, and Harvey’s vocal delivery is half-crazed, half-sweet, both rousing her country and blaming it for whatever happened to “Bobby”. Not for the last time on the album, the juxtaposition of almost medieval-sounding instruments set to modern popular rhythms (I’ve used the term ‘medieval reggae to describe several songs on the album to friends!) works brilliantly at making those songs archaic and contemporary at the same time. ‘The Last Living Rose’ sets a musty brass hook and a vaguely militant drumbeat against Harvey’s no-nonsense delivery and clean-muted guitar while the affection she has for “beautiful England” is at odds with her criticisms: “gold, hastily sold, for nothing, NOTHING”, or loving “take me back to beautiful England”.
Whatever messages spill from Harvey’s perfectly judged lyrics (never too heavy-handed, never too understated), her subtle nuances indicate that this is a record about war. The training-drill vocal phrases present in ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ or ‘The Glorious Land’ and the marching rhythms of ‘In The Dark Places’ are played with sometimes simple melodies, accompaniments and instrumentation of old English songs. ‘..Maketh Murder’ was a great choice for a lead single from the album, like the experience of war itself, the autoharp chords introduce themselves fairly happily, till the lyrics add a sense of foreboding and the bass implied by the brass parts add a darkness to the track.
After the fairly smooth flow of the opening four tracks, the jarring rhythms of ‘All & Everyone’ that eventually gather momentum (a comment on conflict?) seem to halt the pace of the record, whereas ‘On Battleship Hill’ reverses this trick by disrupting a fairly conventional upbeat chord progression with a particularly high-register Harvey vocal. The cracked-old crone voice which Harvey introduced in parts of ‘White Chalk’, her last studio album, is back in ‘England’, where she sings about “the country that I love” with the air of an 80 year old village witch; elsewhere, her voice is free of the rage and drama of her first few albums, and has become quite like her speaking voice. Suitable, then, for an album which at times becomes your own personal war correspondent.
Onto ‘In the Dark Places’ then, and in this song, Harvey seems to tell of a mission, where “some of us returned, and some of us did not”, and encapsulates the tone she sets throughout the album – simply stating these facts without reverting to hyperbole is in fact the true horror of conflict and she knows it. ‘Bitter Branches’ contains the album’s most vitriolic vocal, but it's still a far cry from her ‘Rid Of Me’ days; this is a more considered anger, which is more a fearful protest at the inconvenience of her brutal surroundings.
The last quarter of the album is fairly subdued, but does not suffer for it. ‘Hanging In The Wire’ captures a rare moment of peace with serene vocals drifting throughout piano chords, and ‘Written on the Forehead’ seems surprisingly uplifting for a song which recants the tale of people ‘throwing belongings, lifetime’s earnings amongst the scattered rubbish on the sidewalk’ and decrying the lot with the “Let it burn” refrain set against Niney the Observer’s ‘Blood and Fire’ sample. The last track of the album is a fitting end, a eulogy almost, to “Louis” who we gather is John Parish’s “dearest friend”. The final tracks of all PJ Harvey albums, without exception, are special events; so it is a little anticlimactic to not have the lady herself on lead vocal duties here. This does unfortunately detract slightly from the song and puzzles me as a listener, certainly when I imagine Polly singing John Parish’s opening verse, but overall ‘The Colour of The Earth’ sounds celebratory (perhaps due to surviving the metaphorical atrocities of the album’s twelve tracks and living to tell the tale?).
Overall then, I felt that PJ Harvey has delivered a fantastic album, which few other artists would have had the experience to produce. Since winning the Mercury in 2001, she has gone lo-fi glam (‘Uh Huh Her’) and piercingly mournful (‘White Chalk’), but here becomes the anonymous, yet patriotic, bystander and storyteller. Interestingly, this is the first album cover which does not picture Polly Jean herself.
Listening to this latest reinvention of PJ Harvey, there were no moments where I found myself reaching for the skip button when listening to this album. In fact, I usually found myself skipping backwards to hear songs again. She manages to spin the most substantial songs out of seemingly very little: the repeating chords and phrases don’t grate as they would have in another artist’s hands, and this is due to her lyrical and vocal ability to keep things interesting throughout. Not to mention a sterling production job by John Parish, whose salt-of-the-earth vocals back her up on most of these numbers. She loses a few points for giving Mr Parish lead vocals on that beautiful last track though!
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