PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)

Fair enough, Lex.

I know I'm in the minority here, but White Chalk is the last time her music legit hit me like a hammer. LES was very good, but...as much as I respect it I can't quite connect with it on the same level.

"also "the wheel" isn't half the song of anything on LES"

for me its those backing vocals. feel like kind of a tired reprise.

I love that she has switched focus from interior to exterior. Too many (imo) ppl expect women artists to focus on their interiors and/or reward it (and emotional bluntness) over those whose focus is more broad or varies. I love her for writing about all of it. Women writing songs about war: more please!!

I've never gotten the sense that she's "autobiographical"; rather, she uses characters, and To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire are full of them.

yeah but the monologue/descriptions are still all about the inner thoughts of women, focused on the interior and still falling into the category La Lechera is describing; Let England Shake is pretty emphatically more about the description of external events filtered through a perspective rather than a peek behind the mysterious curtain that hides women away from the world

yeah I agree with that

i swear i mean this as a compliment when i say you could base a really cool college course around LES. it's interesting to me on a lot of levels.

certainly Great War poetry

pretty emphatically more about the description of external events filtered through a perspective rather than a peek behind the mysterious curtain that hides women away from the world

exactly -- autobiography and interior narratives are different from each other but they are both more fundamentally different from providing a view of the external world/its workings through a unique lens, and that's what I think she does and I LOVE IT

The last album that floored me was white chalk. I hadn't expected this kind of introspective tour de force from her. The wildness which apparently was never per se or natural was totally gone and suddenly there was this very vulnerable human being. LES was too much of an exercise in political history for me. Too much of a concept album of the very boring kind. I was never really interested in history. To be honest i don't care for it. Especially if it is not the history of my home country which i don't care for too much neither. Only the part which is usually not written about in the history books is interesting. For example the big mystery why millions of germans followed hitler like lemmings.

i'm p sure there are books abt that

suggest ban based on history

the reasons i love LES have little to do with history! funnily enough.

There are books mentioning it of course. But there never has been a reasonable explanation i have heard of.

And what is it then? The music?

While LES has narratives, it's a mistake to call it history in song or an exercise in political history. "Bitter Branches," to take one, has enough fury to suggest all kinds of sources.

There are books mentioning it of course. But there never has been a reasonable explanation i have heard of.

― it's the distortion, stupid! (alex in mainhattan), Tuesday, February 2, 2016 2:21 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people tend to do what they're told by authority
it's easier to not intervene than intervene
most ppl didn't know the full extent of what was going on
a lot of germans at the time were p anti-semetic to begin with

demagoguery? i'd listen to a PJH album about that.

yeah, i dunno, i just think it's a really good work of art that goes beyond the subject matter for me. i love the red badge of courage but not because it's a "war novel". kinda like that.

i got mad when simon reynolds posted something on facebook like blimey just what we need another anti-war album and i felt like he was missing something. it goes beyond that! for me anyway. it hits a lot of emotional buttons for me. just vocally alone.

i just think it was a really successful THING. i mean i guess it could have been about a lot of things subject-wise, but she set out to do something and it worked really well. compelling. powerful. well-constructed. if it had been a symphony i would have said wow great symphony!

Xp. Ant-semitism in Germany has not been stronger than in the neighbouring countries. But how can a highly civilized country follow a primitive squaller like h.? where did all the culture, the literature, the philosopy etc. go? Sorry i don't want to derail the thread.

While LES has narratives, it's a mistake to call it history in song or an exercise in political history. "Bitter Branches," to take one, has enough fury to suggest all kinds of sources.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 2, 2016 8:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes - it takes the character work PJH was already renowned for and applies it to a situation that's actually familiar to us rather than something strange from her imagination - she approaches getting into the headspace of WW1 soldiers very similarly to how she approaches getting into the headspace of heroines of unwritten gothic victorian novels on ITD?

plus, her pre-LES work is absolutely littered with imagery of war and violence to describe internal/emotional states, or sometimes actual human conflict! i mean LES was not the first time she did the whole journalist-in-war-zone thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AhTTXmsxlM

so yeah, her work has always had these through-lines, but there's also been a huge shift in perspective each time as well...

wouldn't mind moving to the planet people confused by the success of the nazis live on

I'm also not particularly interested in history, especially war history, but fully agree with Scott here: regardless of specific subject matter, LES just resonates with me on an aesthetic and emotional level.

And what is it then? The music?

I know you basically only like faithful replications of 80s jangly indie, but... of course it's the fucking music.

hahaha

I know you basically only like faithful replications of 80s jangly indie

I count 16 that I'd say were strongly related to jangly 80s indie one way or another.

Oh wow another Swell fan!

"The Wheel" is great, I'm not sure where people get LES part II from this, at least not musically. It has more in common with "The Sky Lit Up" than anything that was on LES. I'm all for a return to heavier guitars from PJH.

Xp. Ant-semitism in Germany has not been stronger than in the neighbouring countries. But how can a highly civilized country follow a primitive squaller like h.? where did all the culture, the literature, the philosopy etc. go? Sorry i don't want to derail the thread.

― it's the distortion, stupid! (alex in mainhattan), Tuesday, February 2, 2016 2:42 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sadly not much has been written about hitler's rise to power or WWII, so if PJ Harvey lets us down with this new album, we may never know the answers to these questions

in her mannered recent work

Xposting, but "To Bring You My Love" is imo her most mannered record. I anything, I find that and "Stores" (maybe) her only mannered records, and sort of wish she would make more of them. The rest are either pretty raw or pretty weird and as awesome as they are often undersell her songwriting/playing, especially stuff like "White Chalk," "Is This Desire?" and "Uh Huh Her," not to mention her Parish albums. In fact, LES aside, I never listen to any of her albums but the first two and the two aforementioned "mannered" albums, even though I consider her one of my fave artists of all time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsLqsqbObyg

that break at the end there actually makes it better. i wonder if its on the album like that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/i-gave-a-famous-rock-star-a-windshield-tour-of-dc--and-didnt-know-who-she-was/2016/03/18/8124ab28-e488-11e5-bc08-3e03a5b41910_story.html?postshare=2041458308548680&tid=ss_tw

That dude is my hero:

The father of my daughter’s best friend is Brendan Canty, the drummer for Fugazi, the D.C. hardcore band I knew nothing about until I Googled it. Brendan smiled patiently when I confessed my ignorance. He laughed when I told him I had spent three hours in a car with PJ Harvey without having any clue who she was.

How cool it would be, I thought, to document how my words evolved into her art.

Her manager was enthusiastic about the idea when I first contacted him. Her publicists, too, expressed interest. I asked whether Polly would share her notes with me.

No, a rep later said, and she also wouldn’t give me an interview. But Polly “does love the idea of you writing about your experience that day.”

i live pretty near to benning road. yay?

Surely 99% of the people in America (and a substantial chunk of the people in Britain) could spend three hours in a car with PJ Harvey without having any clue who she was?

I'm kinda hoping Mark Kozelek makes an album about listening to the songs on this album. "I was in my bedroom when i first heard the song "The Community of Hope" and I read the Washington Post story by the guy who drove Polly around and he didn't know who Fugazi was and that was kinda cool and it turns out they didn't build a Walmart there..."

FWIW The Wheel is great and this new one is even better.

Scott that's spot-on current-Koz sentence structure.

xpost

Yeah, both of the new songs are great. Very excited for this album.

Ok I love PJ. I love Mick. But this is one of the dumbest songs of all time. "Ok this is drug town" ?!???? Smh

the backup singers gave me chills

x-post--I guess PJ is quoting that Washington Post guy who drove her around

doesnt make it any less corny! shit man this is like as basic as it gets.

Virtually every PJ Harvey song is in character and this one is as well, she's articulating entry-level prejudices, sounding basic is kind of the point.

lol ok but like the music is basic af too. nothing interesting going on here + cringy bad lyrics. also theres something gross about rich british lady getting driven around a poor black neighborhood and then writing SRS SONG about it. not into it at all. terrible.

I'm with schwitterz on this.

I agree with that - White Chalk is where she started her current approach, which is an approach I like as much as the first two records. Everything else in the middle is hit-or-miss for me.

This has been posted before, but I would KILL to see her play a version of Grow, Grow, Grow like this. The fact that she does whatever she wants and always has is what makes me respect her immensely though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uctrQBJSY8

http://www.undertheradarmag.com/news/pj_harvey_and_harry_escott_share_new_cover_of_english_folk_standard_an_acre/

aaaaaaaaaaamazing
her voice! the song!

i like the arrangement a lot too

it's also super long!
long live pj harvey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liRxipTbLWo

anybody have any idea which pj song this is referencing at 3.56 - sounds like something off TBYML

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhttLXBkJvE

That's beautiful, An Acre of Land, and pretty much a perfect fit for that movie I'd imagine.

A new BBC4 radio documentary follows Polly around as she's composing music for a theatre adaptation of All About Eve. Lovely to see her creative process so intimately and up close (including her recording demos at home on a Tascam 4-track). She doesn't seem to be interested in being a alt-rock star/performer anymore, too — it seems that the last tour was kind of goodbye to that part of her life.

Also, excerpts of gorgeous music throughout (and I don't only mean the two songs that are the main focus of the documentary, but also about the instrumental and ambient pieces from all the different plays she's contributed to); makes me wish they'd release an anthology of her theatre scores.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002g8h

A new album - soundtrack to All About Eve - out this Friday.

https://i.imgur.com/t6ptDYE.jpg

01 Becoming
02 Shimmer
03 The Sandman [ft. Gillian Anderson]
04 Waltz
05 Descending
06 Lieben
07 Ascending
08 Cadenza
09 The Moth [ft. Lily James]
10 Träume
11 Arpeggio Waltz
12 Change in C

Two tracks available here:
https://pitchfork.com/news/pj-harvey-shares-2-new-songs-from-all-about-eve-play-listen/

That's Phil Collins' daughter, right? If Phil could still play I would love to hear him on a PJ Harvey record.

Different people. Phil's daughter is Lily... Collins. This is the lead actress from Baby Driver.

Even so! Phil and PJ would be rad.