PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)

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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

I can only wholeheartly agree with the praise of her live shows - the show I saw was amazing. What a performer she is! And the 10-piece band sounds tight and massive - it was a far cry from the (also great but intimate and messy) White Chalk solo show I had seen a few years ago. I'm catching the tour again in the summer when she comes back to Europe, can't wait.

Overall I like The Hope Six Demolition Project quite a bit - and it's grown on me a lot over the past year since I was pretty indifferent to it at first - but I think that the outtakes from the album she's released online (Guilty / A Dog Called Money / I'll Be Waiting) are stronger than some of the tracks that actually made the record. PJ doesn't do interviews anymore but according to her co-producers (Flood, Parish) the songs didn't 100% fit her vision for the album... which kind of makes me admire her even more for her self-editing instincts and discipline. It takes some strong focus to leave a song like Guilty off the record.

Here's a review of the Austin show

http://music.blog.austin360.com/2017/04/29/at-packed-stubbs-pj-harvey-thrilled-fans-and-avoided-nostalgia/

excerpts from the review:

Harvey, looking like she had not aged a day in 20 years, took the stage with a nine-piece band who took the stage in single file, some playing horns (Harvey played a sax on and off throughout the evening), most playing drums. It looked and felt like the world’s most Episcopalian second line.

...fully half of the songs were from “Hope Six” with three from the enigmatic “White Chalk” and a smattering from older albums

SET LIST
Chain of Keys
The Ministry of Defense
The Community of Hope
The Orange Monkey
A Line in the Sand
Let England Shake
The Words That Maketh Murder
The Glorious Land
Medicinals
When Under Ether
Dollar, Dollar
The Devil
The Wheel
The Ministry of Social Affairs
50ft Queenie
Down by the Water
To Bring You My Love
River Anacostia
ENCORE:
Guilty
Is This Desire?

That's a similar set to what we got in Houston. Seeing some of the other setlists, it looks like they shuffle around some of the newer songs in the latter part of the set from night to night, and rotate a couple of the catalog songs in and out from a pool. We got "To Talk To You" from White Chalk mid-set, and she closed with "The River" from ITD?. I'm not often jealous of Dallas, but they got "Highway 61 Revisited" and "The Last Living Rose" (neither of which we got) for an encore.

So happy to hear "The River" live

For her show near Washington DC tonight, she will be joined by Anacostia's Union Temple Baptist Choir, who were on the controversial song on her latest effort

She played a fair chunk of the album last Saturday as well as cuts from Let England Shake. She wore her saxophone like a guitar. Except for performances of "To Bring You My Love" and "Down by the Water" in the last ten minutes, she didn't cede an inch to audience expectations. She was in her own world.

What's funny is I was with a friend who professed to be a huge fan, particularly of the first three albums and "Songs," a friend who also supposedly really likes Nick Cave, and a friend whose politics lean left of left. And yet, he seemed really irked that she was playing mostly stuff from the most recent albums. I think it's more than likely an outdoor festival is simply not the best place to ask someone to meet someone half way, but yeah, she didn't cede an inch. Didn't deviate a bit from past sets on the same tour, either, so perhaps she and the band are just not currently equipped to change the script. From setlist to staging, this is what this tour is.

This might be an unpopular opinion but I think that the songs from Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project work amazingly well live. I was totally fine with just a handful of oldies (“50ft Queenie” / “Down by the Water” / “To Bring You My Love” / “Highway 61 Revisited” / “Is This Desire?”) thrown in at the very end of the show and for the encore. I guess I understand some people’s frustration that she refuses to play most of her biggest hits (e.g. Stories... have been 100% absent from her setlists on this tour) but then again, PJ Harvey is not really the kind of artist from whom you’d expect a nostalgia/best-of set.

That being said, the last time I saw her was at her own (fantastic) show. In two weeks I’m seeing her again, this time at an open-air festival gig. I wonder if my opinion will change.

They work better live, yes; the material's histrionic roots demand a performer with gusto. I thought The Hope Six an interesting failure.

Personally, new material or no, I'd prefer she play guitar again.

Alfred's dead on regarding Pj being in her own world. I thought the show in Seattle was top-notch, she's a consummate performer. Josh mentioned the setlist/staging above, I really do believe this is an intentional statement and that the older material would get in the way (hence why it's at the end). When she does switch gears to the old material the crowd goes wild and that serves her well. My only disappointment was "Near The Memorials.." in the encore - felt like she could've thrown a bone there, but she did play "River" so...

She's kind of like Neil Young in that respect...you go see her, and you gonna see the show she wants to play. I can understand the way and why the material has been selected. The band she's got is more or less the band that was heavily involved in the creation of the last two albums, so of course that's the stuff they'll play and can sustain a set list alongside a few older songs (which really aren't rearranged the way they could have been for this band--imagine a "50ft. Queenie" with everybody doing percussion!). It's remarkably brassy/ballsy that this is how she's doing her first large-scale US tour in yoinks.

I’d also like to add that the White Chalk material—she’s been playing “When Under Ether,” “The Devil,” “To Talk to You,” and now apparently “Dear Darkness” and “White Chalk,” too—fits very well with the current show, despite the lyrical content of these songs being more introspective and not political/historiographical/journalistic.

This might be just my underdeveloped theory but . . . people often point out Let England Shake as a major sea change in her career (where the focus shifted from inspecting the personal to observing the world around her), whereas I think that the bigger step was her move from blues- to folk-inspired songwriting, which seems to have occurred around 2005-2006, when she was working on White Chalk—although some might say that songs like “Pocket Knife” or “The Desperate Kingdom of Love” from Uh Huh Her had foreshadowed it.

This is of course very simplifying, it’s not like every pre-2006 PJ song has its roots in blues and every post-2006 one in folk, but her vocal delivery definitely changed—and I’m not only talking about her singing in a higher register, but also about enunciation/articulation. Gone were the dirty riffs and rhythmic guitar playing in favour of strummed chords; the vocal melodies became simpler, the arrangements more acoustic, even her lyrics bear more resemblance to (or even directly reference) old folk songs. I guess that’s why the inward-looking White Chalk tracks fit nicely among the newer ones—they seem to come from the same musical family.

(I hope I make sense. Sometimes it’s tricky to put my thoughts into English words, and I’ve had two pints, so forgive me if it reads as gibberish and carry on.)

I agree with that - White Chalk is where she started her current approach, which is an approach I like as much as the first two records. Everything else in the middle is hit-or-miss for me.

This has been posted before, but I would KILL to see her play a version of Grow, Grow, Grow like this. The fact that she does whatever she wants and always has is what makes me respect her immensely though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uctrQBJSY8

http://www.undertheradarmag.com/news/pj_harvey_and_harry_escott_share_new_cover_of_english_folk_standard_an_acre/