PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)

Suddenly remembered that I saw her twice behind "Stories," once at a club but the other opening for U2! (This is back when Margaret Fiedler was in the band.) What struck me was despite a decade of critical praise and rabid fans and releasing an "accessible" album that got great reviews, I felt like no one in that place knew who the fuck she was at all. A useful reminder of scale.

Was that the last album she properly toured behind?

nah there was a big les tour

Maybe she just doesn't tour the States? There have been one-offs here and there, I guess.

Honestly I'll still stand by the actual rock songs on Stories, they're mostly fantastic. It's the moments when the tempo drops that let it down, and unfortunately there are lots of them.

The only albums I genuinely love all the way through are Dry and LES, but Is This Desire has her highest highs almost unquestionably.

Just starting the new one again. It's the first time I've heard Hope Six in a month and the clumsy way in which the lyrics are forced into the melody would put the Manic Street Preachers to shame.

nah dude she toured the states for les. there's a sickkkk soundboard recording of the san francisco show circulating.

OMG that stories review.

xpost Yeah, it looks like she played ... 4 shows in the US behind it, two in NYC, two in CA (one of those Coachella). Looks like her 2009 tour with Parish was more extensive.

oh my bad.

Good album. Might even turn out to be a great one.

I have the new one but haven't listened yet, so for now I'll just post this dyn-o-mite performance of my favorite song from Is This Desire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZR4QYRi5Hc

OK so on first pass I like the album -- without paying a lot of attention to the lyrics, but the ones that stood out to me seemed more like fragments than complete thoughts. I don't get the sense she's up to anything too straightforward. I like the rhythms and the saxophone, and her singing.

there's a sickkkk soundboard recording of the san francisco show circulating.

― kurt schwitterz

http://www.npr.org/event/music/135519051/let-san-francisco-shake-pj-harvey-in-concert

"Medicinals" is righteous but am not surprised that ILX posters would be outspoken in their cynicism about traditional medicines, animism, etc.

This album is so bad and annoying I'm now frightened to revisit her earlier records in case the Emperor's New Clothes feeling persists.

I'm liking it fine, especially the sax.

Between this and Blackstar, I'm liking a lot more sax-heavy records than usual this year.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/hiphopdx-production/2014/04/Big-Boi_04-09-2014.jpg

this album gets worse with each listen :(

I'd been sort of dreading listening to it - a PJ Harvey album that's great if you tune out the lyrics is not really a great PJ Harvey album - but there's nothing as clunky as the opening track elsewhere. It's definitely at its best when the music is at its most brutal or most elegiac though - The Ministry of Defence is astonishing, and the second half of River Anacostia is like wow.

Enough of the jauntier ones though. Looking back on LES there were definitely moments where she was just the right side of pushing it, and that album's acclaim was like carte blanche for her to go well over that line. Something about the project feels misconceived even when the music itself is lovely.

The way she sings "a displaced family eating a cold horse's hoof" is just... no. There are some real crimes against scansion throughout.

I thought this was pretty good on first listen but less so on the second go. Agree about the clunky scansion. I like the opener a lot regardless, weirdly the verses remind me of 'Looking for the Magic' by the Dwight Twilley Band...

Apparently, this is number one in the midweeks.

the first song on this sounds like 'take the skinheads bowling'

take the skinheads bowling is an excellent song.

what's difficult to accept is the dependence on falsetto and echo, at times both on the same song.

the second half of River Anacostia is like wow

first PJH album where the male backing vox have been a highlight

Apparently, this is number one in the midweeks.

Polly Jean: How many copies got returned on Monday?
Chorus: I heard it was 28,000

this record is good

first PJH album where the male backing vox have been a highlight

Rob Ellis begs to differ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYIAy4uF3UI

Polly Jean: How many copies got returned on Monday?
Chorus: I heard it was 28,000

― Jeff W, Tuesday, April 19, 2016

lol at this

This list stinks:
http://www.stereogum.com/1872593/pj-harvey-albums-from-worst-to-best/franchises/counting-down/

Might as well have written 'I like noisy guitars' and left it at that.

I might rate White Chalk and 4TD higher but: "I like guitars" isn't the thing with ITD? at 2.

nah I like the list fine because ITD? is so high

Yeah, White Chalk's quite high, too. "I like noisy guitars" doens't seem like the narrative there.

ILM is the only place I've seen that gives a damn for WC and ISD.

hooray for ilm i guess

Counterpoint: get the hint, ILM!

Although I like the placing of Is This Desire? so highly, Uh Huh Her is way too high and it feels already like they're revising Let England Shake's reverence based on the lukewarm reception of the Hope Six Demolition Project.

Number one!

Well done you.

I finally checked it out last week---had to make myself listen a second time, but something pulled me back in, like it had to; I'm usually not that dutiful---and now, 3.2 spins in, I'm really enjoying most of her tragical reality tour (though not tracks 1 & 2). She sounds startling and startled, by the details and sheer weirdness of these times, as her voice veers and finds purchase in the dark heavy shiny spiky curves, suggesting a garden, sometimes of wrought iron ---initially thought it was all from DC, so this would be the long fences of Georgetown----or big black vehicles, limos or four-wheel-drives, cruising and bouncing through the various neighborhoods and becoming the architecture, monuments and housing developements and parks and gutted areas and demolition equipment---for renovation, yay: involved framework, as the people surface and flash by, fade away once, again, in her snapshots and notes.
I could go to her site and get all the words, but think they're better this way, for the most part Calling it the Vietnam Memorial, leaving "Veterans" out, somehow ricocheting off "Lincoln Memorial", making me think more of the associated bloodbaths: stark profusion, more sheer weirdness, also rebounding off her chirpy vocal, leading a children's expedition around the grounds.
Quite an emotional range here, but I also like the one bit of straight-up lightning up, when she's tromping along, carrying on about all those groovy traditional "Medicinals", 'til she comes across "an old lady in a wheelchair, with her Redskins cap on backwards", who is taking some kind of de facto medicine from its newspaper wrapping, as I hear it: the folk process continues, y'all. And she follows it, for her own purposes.
Which reminds me, re old and contemporary musical elements mashed into personalized, stylized expression, without hogging the foreground, that she now seems like a colleague of tuneyards.

"River Anacostia" is so magnificent.

^ Cosign. This is probably my least favorite Pj Harvey album in recent memory, but she always manages to offer up some gems.

Whenever I've had to drive through DC in the last half year, I get this uncontrollable urge to sing "The Community of Hope" but with new lyrics about whatever random shit I happen to see out the window....

Anybody catch the current US tour? I'm probably picking up a ticket today for the show here tomorrow, and am wondering what to expect.

10 piece band playing nearly all of hope six, few songs of LES and i think 5 songs older than that. hour and a half. sax solos. was good.

a friend saw her in Philly and said it was extraordinary

Ticket in hand! Saved about $15 by paying cash at the box office too, because fuck you Ticketmaster website.

Fantastic Show. General admission section was right in front of the stage, so I was no more that 8-12 ft. from her and the band the whole performance. Fun moment came at the beginning of the encore when PJ, who'd been very precise and controlled the whole night, came in a beat too early with her vocal, instead of with the band on the one for "Medicinals", she caught this just a slit second too late, put her hands to her face to hide her embarrassment/laughter before running over to John Parish and putting her head on his shoulder to collect herself before returning to the mic with a big smile and say "Let's try that again, shall we?"

Awesome post, Grisso. Seing her on Friday, so excited. Saw her on Stories tour, she's stone cold classic