PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying

Polly Jean Harvey has never stopped for anyone.

A career spent rushing around the world chamelonising her persona, from the frayed blues punk provocateur (Dry) and the unassuming quiet country girl (Is This Desire?), to the suave, sophisticated socialite (Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea) and the Victorian-era spectre (White Chalk), both in image and sound, Harvey has continually shifted the needle more than any of her peers.

While Harvey’s latest offering, I Inside the Old Year Dying, echoes the minimalism of White Chalk, even then it’s only fleeting, maintaining the notion that each PJ Harvey album stands completely on its own two feet. Unlike David Bowie, Tom Waits, and even Bruce Springsteen – artists who have each shifted their styles and personas over the years – a PJ Harvey record should be considered in isolation, with lineage and through-lines almost non-existent from one to the next.

Harvey’s narratives have always possessed different shades and tones of darkness. Masqueraded in metaphors and mystique, in what is stark, wintry, and positively earthy, I Inside the Old Year Dying sees Harvey unpicking the patchwork of her past: locality. It’s something she has rarely explored throughout her career.

Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings

Having spent the last five years feeding her creative impulses in various artforms, including the film score to 2019’s All About Eve, the vehicle for I Inside the Old Year Dying comes in the way of her first novel, Orlam. A book written in poetic verse and littered with the same Dorset dialect featured throughout I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey also crosspollinates the narrative here, as Orlam’s main protagonist features in several songs.

It makes for an enticing release, particularly following Harvey’s The Hope Demolition Six Project. Critically heralded, to me it was Harvey’s most underwhelming release. Perhaps because of the weight of Let England Shake, in comparison The Hope Demolition Six Project felt slightly hollow. A contrast to I Inside the Old Year Dying, which is an album that rises slowly, like a veil of smoke. Here Harvey has created a blues-inspired folk record that barely operates within the margins.

Positively pastoral, with the woods proving a clear thematic backdrop, the skeletal hum of Prayer at the Gate opens the door into the latest world Harvey has created. With synths and feedback that crack like thunder through the trees, its crisp, wintry edge envelopes the album.

Underpinned by gentle, earthy rhythms, Autumn Term is a number inspired by Harvey’s hero Don Van Vliet, while the acoustic-led splintered folk of Lwonesome Tonight is a nice play on Elvis’ Are You Lonesome Tonight as well as recounting John 13:34. Harvey’s delivers with song with a perceptive nursey rhyme-inspired swagger, as it permeates with the aroma of campfire smoke.

It’s not the only time Harvey participates in this space. On the spatial blues rock of A Child’s Question, August, alongside Ben Whishaw (“Starling swarm and soon will be lorn / Rooks tell stories across the corn”) and later with Colin Morgan on A Child’s Question, July (“Hail the hedge as it grows / Ask the hedge all it knows”), Harvey creatives a series of nostalgic snapshots that intersect childhood innocence with realities that come with adulthood.

Sonically, the rural backdrop remains on See an I –  a carefully sculptured blues number with syncopated percussion and brass – the protagonist echoing an omniscient spirit from a Benjamin Myers novel. Meanwhile, The Nether-edge unfurls with gloomy nightscapes that wouldn’t have looked out of place during Uh Huh Her where Harvey juxtaposed the quiet dynamics with the punk grittiness much of the album contained. Here it fits more seamlessly, exploring inner grains of West Country blues.

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis: Carnage – “the understanding of life and death”

While the title track is perhaps the album’s most accessible passage, All Souls sees Harvey recounting Orlam’s Wyman-Elvis. With carefully plotted arrangements designed to slowly seep into the pores, Harvey creates brooding snapshots of old-world imagery. So too with I Inside the Old I Dying, as Wyman reappears, but in a fantastical world with animals across the same landscapes we imagined during Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen.

With the creaking sounds of manual labour and industry, the grainy folk traipse of August frames and recaptures those images from centuries ago, as the striking duet between Harvey and Whishaw creates an unsettling tension that feeds into Harvey’s early punk aesthetic. Fitting considering the droning Beefheartian blues of Noiseless Noise caps off the album. In many ways, it’s an outlier within the outlier that is I Inside the Old Year Dying.

There’s a ghostly quality to I Inside the Old Year Dying that you can’t quite put your finger on. A dark aura and eerie pathos that Harvey hasn’t captured before. It’s not so much a question of where it fits in the PJ Harvey story, such as its blurred, elusive nature. Like Harvey, I Inside the Old Year Dying will morph into different shapes and colours as the months and years roll on. In that sense it’s a quintessential PJ Harvey record. By extension, who’s to say it’s not up there with her finest work?

I Inside the Old Year Dying is out now via Partisan. Purchase from Bandcamp.