PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

PJ Harvey's 'Let England Shake' has been recently released to overwhelming critical acclaim but to my mind it is not a great album. It's easy enough on the ear. Too easy in fact. There's some Björk, some U2 (from the Joshua Tree days) and just a snuf of good old angry PJ. The poppyness, however, jars with the solemn overall theme for this album: war. She sings about how England has been shaped by Gallipolli, by D-Day and the Great War. But the lyrics are none too subtle ('big guns shooting', 'orphaned children', 'limbs pointing upwards' ...). And they miss the biting irony that another war-obsessed brings to the theme. In Roger Waters' The Wall, The Final Cut and Amused to Death, the pain and waste of war, and also its paradoxical, perverse beauty are brought into relief much more poignantly. PJ's musings on the whole leave me pretty cold. They are pedestrian, derivative and occasionally veer into unpalatable bombast. And yet she has shown in the past, with albums such as 'To Bring You My Love', 'Is This Desire' and 'White Chalk' that she is able to conjure visions of epic, biblical anger and mystery. Here it didn't happen. There are two or three songs which have the fingerprints of a PJ in great form. The second song, which was pre-released, is short but refreshingly direct and unadorned. Despite the simplicity it encapsulates a complex mix of emotions. It's likely the best of the whole album. I also like 'Bitter Branches', which is a fairly unpretentious rock song that goes straight to the quick. 'England' has those Björk overtones, with PJ singing in that unnaturally high tessitura and weird accent, but it sort of works. Not a 'beautiful' song but one that certainly bears repeated listening. 'Battleship Hill' starts chillingly awful - I first thought it was a splash of Enya - but then the song unfolds beautifully, with very effective layered vocals. 'The Glorious Land' comes quite close to being memorable but I'm really unsettled by that gimmicky bugled theme. Also PJ intoning that campy 'Oh America' is a real downer here. There is a lot where my attention starts to drift and a few things that really make me grab for the remote. The final song is one of them: a monotonous, incongruous children song that speaks about an ex-soldier that can't get his friend dying on the battlefield out of his mind. Listen to 'The Ballad of Bill Hubbard' on Waters' Amused to Death and you know what I mean.