I remember PJ Harvey from the time I still went to festivals as a visitor and was just able to drive to it on my own. I remember a few hits, the cooperation with Nick Cave, one gig (where I didn’t knew much of her songs) and now after all those years I can finally review a new album from her! Time to dig out some info first!
I Inside the Old Year Dying’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around her last album in 2017 and how Harvey felt immediately afterwards. What she keenly felt was that somewhere in the endless cycle of albums and tours, she had lost her connection with music itself, a realization that was troubling beyond words.
This was hardly a time of creative withdrawal: thanks to mentoring by the Scottish poet Don Paterson, she worked on Orlam, the accomplished work of poetry – her second, after 2015’s The Hollow of the Hand- that was published last year and became one of the new album’s key inspirations. There were also the reissues of Harvey’s preceding albums – and, in new editions, their demo versions – that came out between 2020 and 2022. But eventually, two things began to push her in the direction of new songs, music and sounds.
One was the memory of a meeting with the artist and film-maker Steve McQueen, in Chicago, during the Hope Six period. His advice was to remember what she loves about words, images and music and to put away the concept of writing “an album” to focus on and play with these three passions. The other catalyst for a return to music was simple: the sheer act of playing it. Picking up the guitar or sitting down at the piano to play her favourite songs by such artists as Nina Simone or Bob Dylan - reconfirmed her passion for the artform.
Something soon started to cohere. When Harvey began to write new songs, there was a liberating sense of making music for its own sake, rather than the first steps back into the album-tour-album-tour cycle. She drew on the sense of creative freedom she had felt in past musical work on soundtracks, and in the theatre. At the same time, her perspective was shifting, away from the big themes of Let England Shake and Hope Six (“looking out, at war, politics, the world”), towards something more intimate and human.
The new songs, Harvey says, “all came out of me in about three weeks”. But that was only the beginning. The key to what would happen next – at Battery Studios, in North West London - lay in a three-way creative bond that now goes back nearly thirty years, between Harvey, her enduring collaborator and creative partner John Parish, and Flood: nominally a producer, though that word does not really do him justice.
“The studio was set up for live play, and that's all we did,” she says. The importance of this is hard to overstate: if I Inside the Old Year Dying is a very tactile, human record, that is partly because just about everything on it is rooted in improvisation: spontaneous performances and ideas, recorded at the moment of their creation.
There is something profoundly uplifting and redemptive in the recording, qualities exemplified by the album’s lead-off single, “A Child’s Question, August.” “I think the album is about searching, looking - the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning,” says Harvey. “Not that there has to be a message, but the feeling I get from the record is one of love – it’s tinged with sadness and loss, but it’s loving. I think that's what makes it feel so welcoming: so open.”
Prayer at the Gate starts slowly, as if it’s too hot to move much. You’ll hear PJ gently weeping with her voice and after a while sing softly but going pretty high. The song can be called dream pop/rock and will keep you floating gently.
Autumn Term mixes PJ’s and John’s vocals (sometimes even as one). The high notes fly around whilst the song has a higher tempo, but keeps it all very jazzy without burning chords.
Lwonesome Tonight has a very fragile touch and limits the number of instruments, making PJ clearly the leader of this song (not sure about the writing of the title as I copied it from what the label has sent me).
Seem an I reminds me a bit of Cowboy Junkies. I think I even hear an alt sax and some electronics. The song sounds pretty fresh.
The Nether-edge let’s PJ play with her vocal possibilities while the sound mixes jazz with rock and delivers a song that changes every 30 seconds from direction.
I Inside the Old Year Dying has an acoustic touch and sounds like as if recorded during a heatwave. I can almost hear the instruments melt.
All Souls is a soft but dark and hypnotic track whilst PJ sounds like the hypno Queen charming us all the way!
A Child's Question, August mixes again the vocals of PJ and Flood and gives the song a very romantic touch. Once again I hear a very hypnotic sound.
I Inside the Old I Dying starts almost like a Radiohead song and could have been a cover, but this is an original. The duet is the top of the cake and gives it a sweet taste.
August sounds a bit like testing her tired voice, whilst Flood brings in his nice and “calming it all down” voice. In the end the song feels like water slowing coming off the mountain taking it’s time before ending in the sea.
A Child's Question, July gives us a very British accent. The tempo is slow and you can feel the summer’s heat. It’s warm and sweaty, to warm to rock.
A Noiseless Noise is the loudest song on this album and indeed into noise but it has also a very fragile side! It’s a weird ending for a special album!
I didn’t hear a hit but I don’t think that was the starting point. I think she just wanted to be creative and be free in it, free to do whatever she wanted. I hope you dig it and maybe you’ll even see her on stage?
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