Let England Shake

PJ Harvey regales her listeners with yet another collection of haunting anthems on this dual-themed mini-masterwork. The album relates the horrors of war and the inevitable scars the fighting leaves on a country’s psyche, while simultaneously detailing the songstress' love/hate relationship with her UK motherland.

The title track kicks off the album with Harvey declaring “Let England shake…I fear our blood won’t rise again”, yet she quickly reverses course on songs “The Last Living Rose” and “England”, where her songwriting recalls The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society-era Ray Davies, and his wistful reminiscing of pastoral days gone by. PJ’s clearly torn by a love of her homeland and disgust at it’s actions though, as she again does an about-face on the album’s second half, even outright chanting “Let it burn, let it burn…” near the end of the record.

As mentioned, war is the album’s other theme, and it’s atrocities are recounted in gruesome detail on songs like “The Words That Maketh Murder” (“I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat”), in which PJ narrates the aftermath of combat as seen through the eyes of a career soldier, and the cumulative feelings of helplessness (“What if I take my problem to the United Nations?”) those battles evoke. On “Bitter Branches” and “The Glorious Land” (complete with reveille horns on the latter) she laments the fate of the not to be forgotten wives and children the soldiers have left behind, as well as the British imperialism that got them into the mess in the first place.

Grim subject matter aside this, as with all of Harvey’s oeuvre, is an enchanting and at times downright beautiful album with “On Battleship Hill” (shades of Kate Bush) and “Hanging In the Wire” acting as just a couple of the prime examples. Ultimately the album’s combination of grisly lyrics and thought-provoking thematics combine to make “Let England Shake” a worthy addition to what’s become a very long line of excellent efforts from one of music’s most unique and iconoclastic artists.