PJ Harvey – I Inside the Old Year Dying
With I Inside the Old Year Dying, PJ Harvey has produced her most beguiling work yet
Prayer at the Gate opens PJ Harvey’s first album in seven years like a lost portal creaking into use. Drawing the listener into a meticulously constructed world wholly her own, Harvey implores you to cast aside your prejudgments with a found language teetering on the brink of familiarity and uncanniness. 'Wyman, am I worthy? Speak your wordle to me', she sings and, with that, all her personae – grunge feminist, filicidal killer, pop star, war poet – crumble away to lead you on through a record unlike anything else she’s released. But Harvey has always been a storyteller. I Inside the Old Year Dying sees her leave behind the journalistic music of her previous record, The Hope Six Demolition Project, and mine new depths of imagination.
Harvey continues her collaboration with long-time musical partners John Parish and Flood, pairing indelible melodies and structures with a writerly form that intertwines modernism with ancient unknowns. It has less in common with her previous work than it does with the novels of an author like Max Porter (someone Harvey has publicly admired), who pairs avant-garde style with a penchant for folkloric creatures and magical manifestations. Harvey here is fascinated with nature and a countryside populated by blethering angels, 'chalky children' and myth. It has the aura of an artefact from long ago that displays characteristics out of its time. Take Lwonesome Tonight, where Harvey sings with the archaic or invented vocabulary of some past century, but about Elvis and Pepsi.
Further blurring the picture is the way Harvey uses her voice – stretching it and muffling it and undulating in ways unfamiliar (notes from the recording sessions reveal Harvey was specifically directed to sing as little like herself as possible). An effective smattering of electronic manipulation of her vocals, notably on the I Inside the Old I Dying and The Nether-edge, and the use of samples and field recordings on Autumn Term and Seem an I make placing the record temporally difficult and lend to the overall sense of feeling untethered.
As the title suggests, I Inside the Old Year Dying feels like a product of Harvey cocooning, burrowing into a space that feels protected and unhinged from relevance or topicality, as time and space wither. With that she has produced her most beguiling work.
Listen to: Autumn Term, All Souls, A Child’s Question, July