PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (2011)

Mirniji, ali uznemireniji, nezniji, ali opominjajuci, harmonican, ali ispreturan...prelep album!!!

Patti Smith told The Guardian: "[I've been] listening to Polly Harvey's new song - she has this new song, 'The Words That Maketh Murder' - what a great song.

It just makes me happy to exist. Whenever anyone does something of worth, including myself, it just makes me happy to be alive. So I listened to that song all morning, totally happy."

The title of Polly Harvey’s seventh album, 2007’s White Chalk, seemed to address England’s psycho-geography by way of Dover’s iconic coastline. Perhaps that’s projection. But her eighth most definitely does. It’s a concept album, folks. Songtitles include The Last Living Rose, England and The Glorious Land, with a distinct whiff of landscape and legend. A fragile Hanging in the Wire even namechecks “the white hills of Dover”. Pete Doherty doesn’t have a copyright on singing about Albion, you know.
Going by her latest photos, Harvey’s position as the alternative Lady Gaga, confounding expectations and changing hair styles at each turn, remains undiminished. This time, the black gown and headpiece screams Hel, the Norse God of the dead. And when you read the lyric sheet, death fair stares you in the face. Its first words are “Let England shake / Weighed down with silent dead”; The Last Living Rose sings of “the grey damp filthiness of ages,” and it turns out “the glorious fruit of our land” is “orphaned children”. Add various references – Battleship Hill, Bolton Ridge, the Anzac trench – to the disastrous Allied invasion of Galipoli, Turkey in World War One and we appear to have a psycho-geographic lament around the perils of colonialism and the ravages of war that resonate right up to the present.