PJ Harvey, upon discovering a strayed twig poking through twill cloth and weave beset on courting her ire by way of irritability, is suddenly struck with inspiration while plucking absent mind-like at this ramshacklum branch. Her roving resumes, and she begins the creative exercise of cataloguing the known green things to better place this petty zummat. “Beech and aller, woak and birch,” she invokes of the trees, “willow, aspen, elder, larch.” Stumped and presently unable to remove this vexing tree from her textiles, her march is suspended for bit an’ drop. From the satchel springs forth Pepsi, and peanut-and-banana sandwiches, tastes she shares with the late Elvis Presley. Ponderous and with hanger abating, she starts her cataloguing anew, but hearing the first notes of “Love Me Tender” surge forward in lieu of any other thought she abandons her venture. Exasperation! But not entirely devoid of success, for that day in forests underfoot the song “Lwonesome Tonight” was written.
From wooded places to limestone reaches, the poetic hero of Harvey’s new record springs. I Inside the Old Year Dying is the tenth studio album from Polly Jean Harvey, the multimedium English artist behind acclaimed works such as 90s’ Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love to the gothic ode White Chalk to the very album Let England Shake. Collaborating with all sorts of whosits along the way (Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Nick Cave, actress Sarah Miles), Harvey’s career has held a sort of fascinating constancy, at least in terms of innovation and quality. Musician friends John Parish and Flood return to I Inside the Old Year Dying, having aided in production for nearly every album since 1995’s To Bring You My Love. Based on Orlam, her book of poetry published in 2022, all tracks from I Inside serve to accompany those collected poems within, while they themselves meter along in standalone tempos.
The album does its best to stand on its lonesome, evoking the same dense foliage of her traditional Dorset county dialect in a voice smooth and pebbly gliding alongst shimmering brooks, other times babbling cooly across sharp lines hidden in rivulets of danger. Rife with alliteration and natural imagery, we see “femboys in the forest find figs of foul freedom,” and “gawly” individuals lunge in dark and sweet places only to be “hooked upon the hart’s-tongue fern” in the end, as in “The Nether-edge” and “All Souls.” Although not as boundary splaying as some previous releases and reminiscent, instead, of classics from English folk, I Inside owes its genius to Harvey’s overlap in creative freedoms, blending her written word into recorded excellence with ease. With such homage paid to the beauty of this Dorset-land, a country of old kings, this album understandably recalls cantos of the past lands, carrying tidings of wilder things all spongey upon a frith of entwining mythologies that feels both ancient and modern at the same time.
gone gazing 