PJ Harvey – I Inside the Old Year Dying (Partisan, 2023)

Through all the month of July I’ve been at home with a broken foot, and only today I’ve been able to grab a physical copy of I Inside the Old Year Dying by Captain Beefheart’s virtual ex pupil Polly Jean Harvey. A record that follows the previous The Hope Six Demolition Project after a span of seven years and the first issued on Partisan Records. If THSDP and the preceeding Let England Shake saw Harvey and her faithful pals Flood and John Parish engage with conscious lyrics, this new album is more focused on a tormented, crepuscular atmosphere.

And if PJ Harvey learned to play saxophone for THSDP adding this instrument to electric guitars, in this last output she plays also bass clarinet and bass, baritone, steel string guitar and piano. Lyrics are now more intimate, in an attempt to develop a language more keen on archaisms as on her recent praised book of poems Orlam, and the general feeling of this work is more cinematic than confrontational as her last records.

Prayer at the Gate opens the album with a strange synth by Flood, a sound a little bit more physical then that of a theremin, and Harvey’s voice over a plain, sorrowful ballad where the chorus is replaced by a childish quasi-scat. The voice comes to a falsetto full of pain that in a way has to lead us to the mood of the rest of the album, as an invitation to regress through grief and to access to our childish, more vulnerable but also open and joyful side.

Autumn Term sees Harvey’s voice reinforced through some falsetto chorus singers as it happened many years ago in Rid of Me – do you remember that appeal to ‘lick my legs I’m on fire / lick my legs of desire’? – but this time the song has more conciliatory rhythms and it’s full of children voices through fields recordings. Lwonsome Tonight, the album single released contemporaneously to the album, is an arpeggioed guitar crossed by another small synth plus a voice reminiscent of another of Harvey’s masterpieces, the album for voice and piano White Chalk.

Seem an I is a plain melody for voice introducing cymbals and a guitar, whose effects are interspersed through the backing vocals creating almost a circular loop, with the idea of a heartbeat more than a reference to ancestral rhythms. The Nether-edge welcomes us with far away voices leaving soon place for Harvey’s singing throughout a synth loop and a minimal drumming. With I Inside the Old Year Dying, first bite of the album spread through the Internet, we’re in the middle of the record with an acoustic guitar, some strange percussions and an electric, sore and melancholic solo.

All Souls opens the second part of the album with small synth’s stutterings, over which PJ Harvey’s singing produces itself into another intimate reflection. Male choruses add deepness and a little bit of restlessness to the song. A Child’s Question, August gives us that tired and slacked feeling typical of the hottest of the months, while I Inside the Old I Dying opens with another arpeggioed guitar and a vocal dirge before Harvey enters. Drums are particularly prominent, not in the sense of a speed rock piece of music, but only reatively, minimal as they are, to the way they’re recorded. The field recording of a bell completes the picture.

August is reminiscent in its structure of Leonard Cohen’s Master Song, from his first album Songs of Leonard Cohen, but the track soon evolves through strange electric echoes and rhythmical noises. A Child Question’s, July is a duet between Harvey and John Parish, while the final A Noiseless Noise is the most reminiscent of the band’s past splendors, with its four minutes of field recordings introducing a ballad evolving into a noisy guitars effluvium alternated by a solemn atonal riff.

Acoustic arpeggios alternating void and full dynamics help create the perfect farewell for a record that is one of the most varied Harvey and her pals gave life in the last years. I know this is a quick and hasty description, but this is the kind of record that grows with more listenings and details will emerge if you are patient enough to buy a copy and give it more than one spin.

Deep as it will reveal itself, I Inside the Old Year Dying is possibly one of Harvey’s most intriguing albums issued in these last years and, even if far from the bursts and the drive of the first three albums, is so interesting I bet it will accompany us through fall and winter this year. After all music needs care, above all in these times dominated by social media and their dynamics, were everything need to be consumed at the speed of light, and this is, at the opposite, the kind of album needing more than one listen to be fully appreciated.