I Inside the Old Year Dying. PJ Harvey

Having listened multiple times to PJ Harvey's new record since its release, I still have a very hard time gathering my thoughts about I Inside The Old Year Dying. There simply seems to be more happening than I can get my head around. Not because the music is so strange or weird or because unimaginable things are happening. Anyone with a track record in music like I have (and hopefully for those with a lot less), will hear familiar elements in the music on this album.

No, it is something less definable, why I'm still more intrigued than outspoken. Take the opening song, 'Prayer At The Gate'. From the first seconds experiment is the word that captures what is happening. Sounds, atmospherics, a not your everyday rhythm. A song blossoms from it all, deconstructed and rebuilt in the sounds. The vocal melody and a slow chord pattern underneath it, played on some kind of keyboard. PJ Harvey is singing at her almost most unpleasant, ever more breathy and forced. Even wobbly at some point. Where in the first listening session, I almost did not get through it, now I'm totally intrigued, hearing more and more in the song. A song that grows and grows 'Prayer At The Gate' is.

This is my message, really on the whole of the album. In every song I'm hearing more and more and liking the album more and more in the process.

I have never been a PJ Harvey fan. I could not listen to her first albums. They were simply to confrontational. Perhaps if I were to give them a chance now? My ears are definitely different receptors than 30 years ago. So, who knows? I haven't yet though. I think my first album is the one with the word chalk in it. Not that I own it, but listened to it. Perhaps wrote on it in the PDF version of WoNo Magazine.

After years of silence, musically, PJ Harvey seems to have left behind all her inhibitions where making music is concerned and got her musical partner in crime John Parish to move with her. Of course, there are familiar instruments to be heard on I Inside The Old Year Dying. It is the way they are used and how they contrast with the voice and the atmospherics or contribute to these, that the inner tension is built (up). Because of this sparse use of instruments, the concept of band music is left by the way side. Here is the difference with tradition. This is the album of a singer, PJ Harvey, with behind and around her only that what is necessary to tell her stories in a musical form.

 

I understand that the lyrics and songs grew from a bundle of poems she released in the past years. This may be the key to why this album is different in sound, more mysterious and perhaps also the cause of the different voices PJ Harvey uses. They will match the feeling she had when composing the poems and the atmosphere that came with them. The result may be impressive, except I'm still getting my head around it. Having listened regularly so far, I am slowly getting to the conclusion this may be the next album I will want to buy. That tells you something, doesn't it? That leaves me with the title. What does it mean?

Wout de Natris

You can listen to and order I Inside The Old Year Dying here:

https://pjharvey.bandcamp.com/album/i-inside-the-old-year-dying