Album review: PJ Harvey’s newest album bleak, brilliant and compelling

PJ Harvey's two-decade-plus career, which started during grunge’s heyday, has variously seen her position herself as feminist firebrand, suave urban documenter and imaginative historian, without compromising a singular vision.

PJ Harvey. Photo by Maria Mochnacz

The Hope Six Demolition Project

P J Harvey

(Island)

Four stars

In a world where reality TV stars are held up as bastions of female empowerment, it’s slightly depressing that the English singer-songwriter P J Harvey isn’t a megastar. Her two-decade-plus career, which started during grunge’s heyday, has variously seen her position herself as feminist firebrand, suave urban documenter and imaginative historian, without compromising a singular vision.

This latest reinvention, the follow-up to her Mercury Prize-winning 2011 LP Let England Shake, has a distinctly arty and journalistic bent.

Recorded last year as part of an open installation at London’s Somerset House, the record takes subject-matter inspiration from Harvey’s trips to, among other destinations, Afghanistan and Kosovo.

It has already inspired controversy: the opening track, The Community of Hope, savages the maligned Hope VI housing project in the United States, in which regeneration has priced out local residents. The song's observations on Washington's less-than-desirable areas have inspired politicians to compare her to the divisive Piers Morgan.

This crass comparison is off the mark — though there are some elements of observation from on high with first-world eyes, here, Harvey’s journalism has the purest motives.

The Community of Hope is the first example of how she cleverly plays observer, acting as a vessel for the collected outlooks of those she met during her travels, and ending with a jaunty but cutting mantra that slices apart the blandness of suburban ambition: "They're gonna put a Walmart here."

The Ministry of Defence follows that statement of intent with a clanging, portentous guitar line that jars wonderfully against Harvey's glassy voice, including talk of Arabic graffiti being sprayed on war-wrecked walls (later, The Wheel mentions "A blind man sings in Arabic"). The pay-off line is stark: "This is how the world will end."

A Line in the Sand, meanwhile, would be a pop hit in an alternate universe, if only its beautifully melodious chorus didn't talk of thousands of people being "killed by hand". "Air drops were dispersed / I saw people kill each other / Just to get there first," Harvey intones, perhaps assuming the role of a peacekeeper or humanitarian worker. Whether she witnessed it herself seems immaterial — the image is haunting.

Nothing that follows can quite match this opening trio. Indeed, Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln, which repeats the titular words seemingly ad infinitum, verges on flat-out irritating. But The Hope Six Demolition Project is nothing if not true to her promise on The Orange Monkey: "I took a plane to a foreign land / And said: 'I'll write down what I find'." The results are, by turn, bleak, brilliant and compelling.