PJ Harvey
I Inside The Old Year Dying
★★★★
Partisan.
DRISK, DRUSH, GAWLY, zun. Chammer, mampus, twiddicks, vog. It’s been seven years since Polly Harvey last released an album, but thanks to the expressive Dorset dialect clumped and scattered across I Inside The Old Year Dying, you could well believe it’s been several centuries. With 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project Harvey cast herself in a thoroughly modern role – the reporter making sense of the world by travelling to Afghanistan, Kosovo, the poorest neighbourhoods of Washington DC, collating her findings in smokedamaged song-dispatches. Despite the brilliant, scorched immediacy of the music, this telling of other people’s stories came with an inherent distance, Harvey’s long-standing gift for reporting on the internal frontlines of desire and distress not wholly transferable to external warzones.
I Inside The Old Year Dying is a very different prospect. It tells a story that belongs to Harvey completely, her own occult Ordnance Survey map, sunk deep in the soil where she was raised. With a few modifications and edits, the lyrics to these songs are pieces from Orlam, the poem cycle Harvey published last April. Early-’90s interviews with Harvey often expressed a fascination with her farm-girl upbringing in Dorset – not least her tales of lamb-castration, an act that features in these poems (“nuts”, helpfully, is glossed as both “joy” and “testicles”). With Orlam, she reclaimed that past, creating a fictional world as earthy as it is ethereal, its dank, thorny landscape so vividly rendered you feel a tetanus shot might be required after reading.
The book tracks a year in the life of a Dorset girl called Ira-Abel Rawles, who endures the perversity of bestial men, falls in love with the ghost of an English Civil War soldier – part Christ, part Elvis and ambiguously sheds her childhood innocence. All this spills into I Inside The Old Year Dying, the complex character-based narrative necessarily stripped out to sharpen the focus on broader themes of death and rebirth. “So look before and look behind/ At life and death all intertwined,” sings Harvey on Prayer At The Gate, the song that opens the album with an eerie horn-like summons, like Warren Ellis as Herne The Hunter. On I Inside The Old I Dying, rustling guitars part for a moment of explicit transformation. “Slip from my childhood skin/I zing through the forest,” sings Harvey, before joining “the chalky children of evermore”, a ghostly rank of souls, lost or otherwise.
It's her own occult Ordnance Survey map, sunk deep in the soil where she was raised.
It makes sense, then, that I Inside The Old Year Dying should feel both like a fresh start and a kind of culmination. Its roots stretch back into Harvey’s past work, back to Sheela-Na- Gig’s primal superstitions or To Bring You My Love’s silty blues. There are echoes of the lost girls of Is This Desire?, of the folk horror/folk memory of Let England Shake, of White Chalk’s etherised waifs and wraiths. Folklore, sex, death, love: it’s nose-to-tail Harvey.
The sense of homecoming is underlined by the tight circle of musicians: alongside Harvey’s guitar, keyboards and bass clarinet are trusted long-time collaborators John Parish (on drums, synthesizers and trombone) and co-producer Flood. Adam ‘Cecil’ Bartlett adds field recordings and “sonic disturbance”, while actors Colin Morgan and Ben Whishaw provide sensitive, low-key backing vocals. Whether the soft Doors-like swell of Seem An I, or the martial abrasions of A Noiseless Noise, these songs let in what they need to let in – although, as the uncanny loops and distortions suggest, they can’t keep everything undesirable out. There are toads and hedgehogs, birds and beetles; something rustles in the hedgerows. There’s a porousness, a to-and-fro between inside and outside, now and then, dream and reality. In Autumn Term, for example, the textbook new start becomes a more profound transformation. “I ascend three steps to hell/The school bus heaves up the hill,” sings Harvey, punctuated by Throbbing Gristle-like bursts of playground mayhem. “Look behind yourself, red-eyed/’Gainst the wilder-mist to what you’ll find”. Wilder-mist is translated as the “steam on a window”; rub your hand across the condensation, suggests Harvey, clear a space to see, and you might catch sight of something unexpected, something out of time, out of place.
That’s explicit on Lwonesome Tonight (sic), where incongruous packed-lunch Americana – “Pepsi fizz/Peanut-and-banana sandwiches” – and echoes of Elvis Presley jar against a supernatural sexual awakening in the woods. The Nether-Edge, meanwhile, evokes the warped electronics and between-worlds hovering of 1998’s Is This Desire?, a needling incantation that quotes Hamlet and alludes to Joan Of Arc in a psychic pile-up of past and present. Harvey’s voice is equally slippery, oscillating between confiding whisper and high keen; on the toad-licking A Child’s Question, July, the kind of feverish folk whirl that could bring the witchfinder general to town, she sings with almost child-like plaintiveness of a “Horny devil/Goaty god”. It could be hammy goth ventriloquising, but it’s too close to the ground for that.
Without a read-through of Orlam, I Inside The Old Year Dying might err towards the cryptic; even with one, it’s no moon/June riot. The atmospheres Harvey and her collaborators create are so thickly sustained, though, they quickly draw you towards their emotional core. The title track stomps onwards over twig-crack percussion, wracked by pain and grief; A Child’s Question, August warms up into a song of yearning, nature-poetry detail and Victorian lace not masking its rock’n’roll ancestry: “Help me dunnick, drush and dove/Love me tender/Tender love”.
In 2019, Harvey’s Instagram account marked her birthday by posting two pictures of the singer standing in a Dorset field, taken 40 years apart. With that ambiguous title suggesting both a backwards glance at all that has been lost, and a move into the future, I Inside The Old Year Dying holds itself at the biting point between old and new, re-evaluation and revelation. What lies on the other side, only Polly Harvey knows, but this is a record she was born to make.
I Inside The Old Year Dying is out July 7 via Partisan
Photo: Steve Gullick
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