100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Let England Shake

02 The Last Living Rose

03 The Glorious Land

04 The Words That Maketh Murder

05 All and Everyone

06 On Battleship Hill

07 England

08 In the Dark Places

09 Bitter Branches

10 Hanging in the Wire

11 Written on the Forehead

12 The Colour of the Earth

‘Goddamn Europeans! Take me back to beautiful England,’ sings a wary and tense Polly Jean Harvey on ‘The Last Living Rose’, a track from her astutely mesmeric album Let England Shake. But neither the track nor the album have time for blind declarations of patriotism. In the song Harvey arrives in London but can only see the faults and the timeless flaws, the ghosts and the hints of what still stands tall. The album is a journey into a land’s blighted history and how the future condemns the present.

This was Harvey’s eighth studio album and, almost two decades on from the bruised dynamics of her brilliant debut Dry, it was astoundingly unexpected. The energy drawn from sexual desire and the struggle to believe that love was optimistic had defined most of her previous works, whether joyously accessible in 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea or coldly, blackly funny on 2007’s White Chalk. And in a way that continued on Let England Shake, except that the recipient was no mere male but instead her homeland.

Here the thwarted romance is between individuals and their country, and the terrible things that can happen when one faithfully serves the other. The record has a feel for the allure of patriotism, and sometimes the protagonists most beyond hope are those with the strongest of beliefs. ‘I live and die through England,’ Harvey declares on the otherworldly ‘England’. ‘It leaves a sadness … you leave a taste/A bitter one,’ she adds, but as the distant mellotron gains purpose, there’s a ‘never failing/Love for you, England’. Nothing breaks easily on this record.

It’s played, essentially, by a trio of multiinstrumentalists: Harvey, John Parish and Mick Harvey. The long-time collaborators matched the solemn words to a new sound; an alternately flowing and clenched mix of autoharp, electric guitar, sparsely produced percussion and stray woodwind. It suggests a new kind of folk music while accessing the oral traditions of the genre’s earliest days. These were songs that could have been sung by soldiers, sometimes before the battle and sometimes long after, and those they would never come back to.

It tells stories that news reports would never be able to capture. On ‘All and Everyone’ Harvey invokes the Gallipoli campaign of World War I, where Allied forces suffered terrible casualties in an attack upon Turkey (the campaign remains a touchstone to Antipodean history and Australian Mick Harvey helped Harvey research the century-old battles and escorted her to commemorative services). ‘Death was everywhere’, is the first line, and the song’s looming dread makes the claim undeniably true, and the arrangement’s respite is simply an acceptance of what is to come.

‘Written on the Forehead’, with its ‘trench of burning oil’, could be a letter home from the occupation of Iraq, where images of destruction have a surreal pitch, and vocal samples from other dimensions float amid the menacing guitar chords, turning pop songs into promises. And when the war is over and the fallen combatants are buried, the landscape turns out to be the victor, absorbing the repeated references to blood and healing every scar left upon it.

P J Harvey took no moral judgment or easy superiority from these songs. She lived out the images, sometimes with the bitterest trace of humour borne of unexplainable loss – ‘what if I take my problems to the United Nations?’ asks ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’, and the song knows it embraces futility. Line by line, song by song, the tracks coalesce into something powerful. The songs dug deeper than any grave, making Let England Shake a document for this time and too many others.