PJ Harvey : Classic or Dud

Loving recent Dylan, soundtracks by Sakamoto, and Greenwood and covering Leonard Cohen. Yup sounds like stuff PJ Harvey would like (in a good way)

I was pleased to see a Mica Levi shoutout, they’re a criminally underrated artist for me

i appreciate her shoutout to rough and rowdy ways

i appreciate her

She walked past me on Sunday (away from The Smile's set) at the Nick Cave All Points East in Victoria Park. Last time Nick Cave did one of these, Kylie appeared as a surprise guest, so I was absolutely convinced PJ was gonna come on for Henry Lee - but sadly not.

Her Instagram has been a sea of photos old and new lately.

Argh, I want a b-sides collection!!! Was hoping that would finish off the reissue series.

Nervous about a new album because Hope Six was such a disappointment.

John Parish said in a recent interview that the new album is recorded but not mastered, will be out some time next year, and is closely tied to her new poetry book Orlam (i.e. the song lyrics are poems lifted from the book—which means an album in the Dorset dialect), so we know that at least thematically it will be miles away from Hope Six.

A B-sides and rarities box set coming this month!!!!!!! My finances, already perilous, are screwed, but fuck it, this is a dream come true!

https://www.thegardenforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2858

Already working out the stuff that's missing though... fuck

e.g. Claudine the Inflatable One but loads of others

https://imgur.com/A66bxne

https://i.imgur.com/A66bxne.jpeg

I'll take it though!

Oh man! I don’t even know a lot of these songs, so excited

yeah, buncha stuff on the last two LPs i’ve never heard of. this is exciting!

This is good news but so many demos there vs so many songs (esp from films, TV series) missing.

No Wang Dang Doodle?

Exciting, and yes, I could think of 20 other rarities that should be here, as well as live stuff, covers, guest features etc. but I'm glad at least these are being released in one place. Record 2 and 3 in particular just look like strong, pretty cohesive albums that will warrant repeated listening.

Despite all the amputations, I am so stoked for this. For the most part I’m clueless to her rare tracks and whatnot, so this is a lot of extra PJ for me to absorb.

As someone said upthread and I find myself saying too often these days, I hope there’s a CD version.

Here we go

https://www.treblezine.com/pj-harvey-announces-b-sides-demos-rarities-box-set/

excuse my ignorance, but how much overlap does this have with all the demo records that have come out in the last couple years?

excuse my ignorance, but how much overlap does this have with all the demo records that have come out in the last couple years?

― bulb after bulb

There's no overlap.

The "Missed", "Dry", "Me-Jane" and "Highway 61 Revisited" demos were not included on 4-Track Demos, and the "Cat on the Wall" and "You Come Through" demos were for some reason omitted from Uh Huh Her - Demos.

Everything else is non-album material B-sides, B-side demos, random rarities, etc.

vinyl only then?

xp thanks! amazing (and great) that there's so much still there after the demo records.

vinyl only then?

― StanM

3CD and digital too!

oh great! thanks!

I almost pre-ordered the CC version yesterday, then realized that the most basic shipping option was more than the cost of the set.

So: I’ll be looking for this in a local record store.

the b-sides/rarities/demos collection is so fucking good. it's the only thing i've been listening to for a few days

what is the deal with "maniac"? very similar arrangement to "down by the water" but a completely different (and great) song

I was about to post a similar comment. Maybe I'm burned out on "Down...," but I might prefer "Maniac."

New album coming, there are two teaser videos on her socials and an announcement is scheduled for Tuesday evening.

A new playlist is now available on Spotify, featuring tracks co-produced alongside @JohnParish50 and Flood: https://t.co/TUAnzOjwWk

New studio clip filmed, directed and edited by #SteveGullick. pic.twitter.com/EWIHnTpzfA

— PJ Harvey (@PJHarveyUK) April 19, 2023

A second studio clip… filmed, directed and edited by #SteveGullick.

If you would like to be first to hear about new music, join the PJ Harvey mailing list community https://t.co/ZUXlkAPgbv pic.twitter.com/dhRhga6xPi

— PJ Harvey (@PJHarveyUK) April 21, 2023

The tracklisting shown in one of the videos indicates the record is based on poems from Orlam.

I Inside the Old Year Dying
out July 7th on Partisan Records

https://i.ibb.co/r4q6hSQ/IMG-9193.jpg

1. Prayer at the Gate
2. Autumn Term
3. Lwonesome Tonight
4. Seem an I
5. The Nether-edge
6. I Inside the Old Year Dying
7. All Souls
8. A Child's Question, August
9. I Inside the Old I Dying
10. August
11. A Child's Question, July
12. A Noiseless Noise

PJ Harvey says, "After many years of work I am very happy to release this collection of new songs. It was a difficult album to make and took time to find its strongest form, but it has finally become all I hoped for it to be."

I Inside the Old Year Dying marks PJ Harvey's first album in seven years, produced and mixed by her long-time creative collaborators John Parish and Flood.

"On this album PJ Harvey builds a sonic universe somehow located in a space between life's opposites, and between recent history and the ancient past.

Scattered with biblical imagery and references to Shakespeare, all of these distinctions ultimately dissolve into something profoundly uplifting and redemptive." - John Harris, March 2023

First single "A Child's Question, August" out tomorrow:

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

that sounds great!

Yeah. I’ve not understood her need to use her high, reedy register for so many of the more recent records, but this is beginning to sound like the Polly I used to admire so fiercely.

I enjoy her in that higher mode, but I agree the "tender love" lines in that^ are really powerful

I've given up waiting for her to sound like the old days. Polly as rock juggernaut remains all-time for me. Polly as chamber-gloom I can take or leave. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever got around to listening to the last one!

It does look like she's playing guitar again in this video, but no, it's not exactly a return to the 90s.

Interesting that she's not on Island anymore.

huh, I really can't relate at all to wanting her to sound like her 90s albums again (if that is what you're saying?). I don't think I ever listened to Hope 6 in full either, but Let England Shake is a masterpiece. Besides, I'm not convinced "rock juggernaut" was ever a truly accurate descriptor for her--at the very least it ignores aspects of her music that were present early on

I meant her trio; those first two albums are two of my fave rock albums of all time, and they do rock. The chamber stuff starts to creep in with album three, and I do like that one a lot and a couple of the ones after (specifically Songs/Stories and Let England Shake), but tbh most of her albums I don't go back to nearly as often as I do those first two.

Hope 6 is the only album of hers that I would call a failure. It's obvious, the lyrics are didactic, the music isn't compelling. Some of those songs worked a little better live. But it wasn't a failure in the sense that "she's lost it." It was more like failed experiment that I'm hoping she progresses from.

Not sure about "A Child's Question." I'm probably biased because someone pointed out that the lyrics are based on poems. The song sounds like a static background for her recitations. Maybe I need to pay more attention to the lyrics.

I kept up with all of the recent reissues, most of which I had on CD. White Chalk was a great discovery for me; I had passed it up when it was released and that is some good, spooky shit.

100% co-sign on White Chalk being an underrated gem, it gets lost between Let England Shake and her earlier rockier stuff like Stories, but it's an incredible record, a true self-contained little spooky world.

I would say that Hope Six and Uh Huh Her are her only two real missteps. Both kind of feel more like failed experiments than fully-realised pieces of work. Judging from the press release, Hope Six left her creatively spent:

I Inside the Old Year Dying’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around her last album in 2017 and how Harvey felt immediately afterwards. What she keenly felt was that somewhere in the endless cycle of albums and tours, she had lost her connection with the music itself, a realisation that was troubling beyond words.

This was hardly a time of creative withdrawal: thanks to mentoring by the Scottish poet Don Paterson, she worked on Orlam, the accomplished work of poetry – her second, after 2015’s The Hollow of the Hand – that was published last year and became one of the new album’s key inspirations. There were also the reissues of Harvey’s preceding albums – and, in new editions, their demo versions – that came out between 2020 and 2022. But eventually, two things began to push her in the direction of new songs, music and sounds.

One was the memory of a meeting with the artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, in Chicago, during the Hope Six period. His advice was to remember what she loves about words, images and music and to put away the concept of writing “an album” to focus on and play with these three passions. The other catalyst for a return to music was simple: the sheer act of playing it. Picking up the guitar or sitting down at the piano to play her favourite songs by such artists as Nina Simone or Bob Dylan - reconfirmed her passion for the art form.

Something soon started to cohere. When Harvey began to write new songs, there was a liberating sense of making music for its own sake rather than the first steps back into the album-tour-album-tour cycle. She drew on the sense of creative freedom she had felt in past musical work on soundtracks and in the theatre. At the same time, her perspective was shifting away from the big themes of Let England Shake and Hope Six (“looking out, at war, politics, the world”) towards something more intimate and human.

Anyway, I think lyrically the new album might be a tough sell for a casual listener? All the poems are written in Dorset dialect and they're part of a narrative that the album doesn't stick to, judging from the tracklisting. And musically apparently the whole thing was recorded/put together via live improvisation between her, John Parish and Flood.

"A Child's Question, August" is lovely (it's the actor Ben Whishaw on the backing vocals, btw) but feels like such an unassuming choice for a lead single; I'm really curious how the whole thing will turn out.

People who have obviously written their own Wikipedia entry

also I’m not convinced an account of a complete lack of inspiration and years of trying to get started is a great way to entice potential listeners

Didn't love *every* era of hers, but at the very least, every iteration of Polly has been interesting. White Chalk was a little boring to me (might have to go back and listen to it to truly appreaciate it) and I thought Hope 6 was more interesting lyrically than sonically but once a fan always a fan. I actually really loved Stories but I think it sounds better live. (Same for Rid of Me).

Imo her sexiest/best record is probably 'Is this Desire'. Idk if Dancehall at Louise Point was any good (Been a couple of years since I've listened' but it certainly had a profound effect on me.

Looking forward to where she goes with 'I Inside the Old Dying Year'.
I'm not reallyyy a creature of nostalgia so even though I don't love everything she puts out- I can appreciate her constant evolution in artistry.

Uh Huh Her wasn't an experiment: it was a return to the brutalist sound of Rid of Me with a decade's worth of knowledge about albums, cool sounds, and textures.

even though I don't love everything she puts out- I can appreciate her constant evolution in artistry.

my take, pretty much. my faves are still To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire, but a new one is always worth a listen

xp Alfred OTM re: Uh Huh Her. I think it holds up really well, plus it opens with one of the all-time great detuned guitar riffs.