PJ Harvey Can Get Away With Anything

I adore PJ Harvey.

Still, when my rock faves go literary, publishing book-length poetry in defunct regional dialect, I’m understandably hesitant. Harvey’s most recent album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, is an offshoot of her verse epic, Orlam, composed in the extinct vernacular of her native Dorsetshire. It’s an intriguing curiosity that I haven’t yet been quite intrigued or curious enough to decipher. 

After seeing the album brought alive onstage at St. Paul's Palace Theatre Wednesday night, infused with Harvey’s self-possessed charisma, its story told as much through movement as words and music, I’m more drawn to construe the album (and poem) than ever. And yet I also feel like I’ve experienced the work in its definitive form.  

I’ve seen Harvey five times before this, each performance starkly memorable. In 1993, at The Academy in New York (with “Creep”-era Radiohead opening), she fronted a metrically skewed yet muscular trio, her guitar fracturing blues with idiosyncratic precision. Two years later, she returned in a flaming red dress, her image newly vampy and revamped, on the To Bring You My Love Tour at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. At First Ave in 1998, she lost herself within the stories of romantic despair from Is This Desire? She was vibrant at the Fine Line in 2000 after the release of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and she stood alone with her guitar on the stage of Madison Square Garden in 2001, seemingly unconcerned with whether the U2 fans waiting for her to finish responded to her songs or not.

Harvey hasn’t been to Minnesota since 2009, when she played out at the zoo. (I missed that show.) In the time since, she’s reinvented herself vocally, exploring ways to sound that she hadn’t before. She’s excavated the legacy of the First World War on Let England Shake and made some confused proclamations about poverty from a moralizing distance on The Hope Six Demolition Project. But I couldn’t hear I Inside the Old Year Dying as the culmination of these leaps and miscues until I saw (and I mean saw, not just heard) her perform the new album played in full during the first half of her set last night. Like every great show I’d seen her put on before, it was unlike all the others and yet unmistakably the work of the same woman.  

I Inside the Old Year Dying is the story (or so I’m told) of a nine-year-old girl named Ira-Abel who has supernatural visions and encounters an otherworldly Elvis figure. But those details mattered only to the extent that they mattered to Harvey. To see these songs staged was like watching a play the libretto for which existed solely in the star’s mind, a performance that was self-contained yet never felt obscurantist. It was an exercise in committed artistic discipline but also a gratuitous display of aura, the sort of achievement only someone whose presence alone inspires gratitude in others can pull off.

Willowy and even deceptively fragile as ever at 54, Harvey wore a tan dress covered in a sort of riding cape patterned with bare branches. Earth tones predominated—the stage backdrop was an image of peeling paint or perhaps vines spreading along a cottage wall or even cracked, dry earth. Harvey frequently hovered in a soft yet harsh soprano, foreign to her early career, sometimes rising even higher to a haunted falsetto, occasionally dropping into her more familiar conversational midrange, suggesting a new personality with each gliding shift in voice.

The music was sui generis folk-rock, recognizably British and rural though derived from no recognizable tradition, never short on tune, electronically augmented and interspersed with field recordings. (As Harvey told Ann Powers last year, the collaborators she worked with were terrifyingly adept: “I could be as specific as to say to somebody, ‘Can you find me a November wind, blowing through barbed wire at dawn?’ And they would have, like, three different options for me.”) She was accompanied by four old guys who know their shit, including longtime collaborator John Parish, and sometimes played guitar herself.

Read along with lyrics like “Drush repeats 'enself/Over Underwhelem/Croopied in the reames/Shepherd gurrel weaves,” as I did once again this morning, and you’re in the company of a woman entranced by the false friends of language, by the ability of words to more likely mislead you into a labyrinth of meaning than to vividly describe a way out. Live, those words were simplified to sounds, the bluntly Saxon consonants in “I laugh in the leaves and merge to meesh/Just a charm in the woak with the chalky children of evermore” sharpened stones or slick moss, the vowels primordial moans slow to cohere into their discrete forms.

The verbal moments that emerged at the Palace were crisp and daunting, "Are you Elvis? Are you God? Jesus sent to win my trust?" What other singer could get away with that? But what doesn’t just redeem Harvey’s arty moments but makes them sting is that they never stink of bullshit—they exude only the musk of fine Dorsetshire horse dung and earthy loam. The moods she invoked were frightening in the way childhood is, with those panicky gaps in knowledge adults mistake for innocence. There was nothing twee or merely mystical afoot.

This was as much a dance performance as a rock show, with Harvey’s movements controlled but never coming off as studied. Her arms led her body; her hands guided her arms. She would stalk, slither, slink, fling her limbs forward like Elsa Lancaster in The Bride of Frankenstein, yet crucially she never seemed to be reaching for an effect. Had she, if those motions were meant to communicate, to express something, they’d haven been sheer cornball. 

The more distance Harvey establishes the more she draws you in—that’s how star power works after all. This is a woman who can stare at you without seeing you, as though she’s looking through you, or can sit listening to the recorded voice of Ben Wishaw as Elvis as though drawn into a private reverie. She began singing the album’s closing track, “A Noiseless Noise,” a cappella, but it grew more propulsive and clamorous, as though grasping and something beyond words. Harvey ended the song with her back to us.

With I Inside the Old Year Dying complete, it was oldies time. The second half of the set dipped into eight of Harvey’s 10 albums, as well as one of her two full-length collabs with Parish. Curiously, it slighted her most direct and affirmational album, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and also avoided her most subdued, White Chalk—make of that what you will. She can revisit these moments from the past and reinhabit her previous selves.

As the artist herself stepped offstage for a bit (no costume change here, though she lost the cape for Act Two), the four men in her band moved front and center to perform “The Colour of the Earth,” the farewell to old comrades that closes Let England Shake. And they, like she, were clothed in the color of the earth, all beige workman-like garbed except for drummer Jean-Marc Butty, who was clad in what my friend Andy called “a pagan utility dress.”

Harvey returned for more tracks from that album, beginning with “The Glorious Land” (“its fruit is deformed children”) She strummed an autoharp for “The Words That Maketh Murder,” sung from the perspective of a man who has seen “soldiers fall like lumps of meat”; in its closing refrain, “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?,” the comic plaint of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” turned into a hollow plea that some human authority can override barbarity, and all too grimly timely.

Still, the question remained whether Harvey could rock out like once had. Her answer was “50 Ft Queenie,” for which I, quite honestly, lost my shit. The way Harvey, early in her career, mutilated gender signifiers, replicating male boasts and threats as though torn between co-opting or mocking them, takes on a new cast in our nonbinary age. 

On two other songs from that era, “Man-Size” and “Dress,” with James Johnston sawing brutally on violin, neurotic time shifts turned inward, simmering and exploding and never quite finding release. Dramatic restraint is another of Harvey’s gifts, exercised on the aching “Black Hearted Love,” the cryptic “The Garden,” and the lovely guitar ballad “The Desperate Kingdom of Love,” performed solo.

As with the new material, how Harvey moved to these songs was as integral as how she sang them, or her guitar work. At the close of the macabre fairy tale “Down By the Water,” which she accentuated by clicking two rhythm sticks, she reached out with one arm just as the stage went black. To begin “To Bring You My Love,” Parish held the first note of the riff just a second or two longer so you could recognize the guitar tone before the melody. As ever, Harvey sang it as an enticing threat, and at its end walked forward, arms stretched forward and palms facing upward, as though carrying a small body.

Harvey’s encore was an anticlimax: two songs from The Hope Six Demolition Project. “The Community of Hope” may jangle forthrightly like she’d always dreamed of writing a Housemartins song, but whatever lord she prays to or curses did not set her down among us mortals to sing about Walmarts, and “Dollar Dollar” is prettier than a song about guilt should be. Harvey is at her best when she’s not striving to be understood, but I guest it was polite of her to prove her fallibility before she left the stage.  

Anyway, I finally put Orlam on reserve at the library this morning. 

Setlist

Prayer at the Gate
Autumn Term
Lwonesome Tonight
Seem an I
The Nether-Edge
I Inside the Old Year Dying
All Souls
A Child's Question, August
I Inside the Old I Dying
August
A Child's Question, July
A Noiseless Noise
The Colour of the Earth
The Glorious Land
The Words That Maketh Murder
50ft Queenie
Black Hearted Love
The Garden
The Desperate Kingdom of Love
Man-Size
Dress
Down by the Water
To Bring You My Love

Encore
The Community of Hope
Dollar, Dollar