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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: PJ Harvey’s “The Hope Six Demolition Project”

PJHarvey

Since her 1992 debut Dry, PJ Harvey avoided repeating herself. While only 2007’s piano-based White Chalk seemed constrained by a willful need to distinguish itself from its predecessors, each of her first 10 albums (including two collaborations with John Parish) created a unique sonic and lyrical world. So it’s a surprise that her new LP seems a bit like a sequel to her last, 2011’s Mercury Prize-winning Let England Shake.

But only a bit. It takes the geo-political frustrations that fueled Anglo-centric anti-war album Let England Shake and expands them to other global issues, most pointedly on “The Wheel,” a bluesy stomp that’s one of the LP’s highlights. “Hey little children don’t disappear,” she sings, and she’s answered by a male chorus chanting, “I heard it was 28,000,” the number of U.S. children reportedly killed by gun violence between 2002 and 2012. Harvey traveled to Kosovo, Afghanistan and the United States while working on songs for this album, and some locales are explicit, as in the allusions to Washington, D.C., on “Near The Memorials To Vietnam And Lincoln” and “River Anacostia”; others are more general but still topical, such as “The Ministry Of Defence” and “The Ministry Of Social Affairs.”

Harvey’s often been at her best when she channels anger into catharsis, and while Let England Shake was a haunting meditation, The Hope Six Demolition Project adds moments of electric abandon, bluesy swagger and skronking saxophone. Working with longtime collaborators Parish, Flood and Mick Harvey (no relation) as well as others, Polly Jean turned the recording of the album into a public art installation, and it contains her loudest, most abrasive moments since 2004’s Uh Huh Her (although it’s nowhere near as loud and raw as 1993’s Rid Of Me).

In short, Harvey has indeed repeated herself: The Hope Six Demolition Project is yet another remarkable PJ Harvey effort.

—Steve Klinge