That their plates ...

... In public now not as vile material collections, but rather how events are perceived, is a privilege, what Polly Jean Harvey has worked hard over the years. About her two early works "Dry" and "Rid Of Me" on which her voice when she'd skinned alive - the guitars this should not even from the normal commercially, but rather from a bad reputation intermediaries for domestic demand originate torture. Or the leaden, lucid "To Bring You My Love", where they were as glaring made-vamp the female equivalent to Nick Cave. Grandiose albums all - PJ Harvey was Feist, Karen O., Anna Calvi or Joan As A Police Woman so not have been undoubtedly with these and the following works to a kind of role model, without them would be conceivable.

So now "Let England Shake", four years after the last regular solo album, "White Chalk" and, of course, eagerly awaited. If PJ Harvey is the inspiration for a whole generation of songwriters, so she comes itself on this record their own model Patti Smith as close as hardly before. And that applies both to the predominantly classical instrumentation as well as the substantive orientation. If the term 'concept album also likes' cause something astray, so it's become a monothematic, political work. Each of the twelve songs a statement about war, crisis, England as a nation and America as a dubious model without interruption is talk of death, blood, suffering, depravity and futility.

The strangely tender, prancing title track, for a wake-up call still fall quite moderate, follows with "The Last Living Rose" a poisoned love letter to their country of origin (Goddamn 'Europeans! Take me back to England ... let me walk through the stinking alleys, to the music of drunken beatings ...), continues seamlessly in "The Glorious Land" -. Guitar march here to ancient box trumpet sounds and snappy message (What is the glorious fruit of our land Its fruit is deformed children) and go on about corpses (The Words That Maketh Murder) and Battlefields (All And Everyone), enchanted, almost elfin (On Battleship Hill), bleak and sad like a Kusturica movie (England, you leave a key, a bitter one ..., England`) and with the simplest of words (to lamenting): "To our young men hit with guns in the dirt and in the dark places" (In The Dark Places).

We had almost forgotten that PJ Harvey is also harder - ". 50ft Queenie" with "Bitter Branches" succeeds a two and a half minutes reference to previous feats like and "Man-Size". This derogation should, however, remain, the rest of the album is temperate in all musical textual claim, even the modest reggae the feedforward "Written On The Forehead" blends the content focus. John Parish, longtime comrade and also to "Let England Shake" almost in every song as a duet partner here, may then initiate the swan song 'The Colour Of Earth ", a bittersweet dance related to Asian history.

About the distance may not be quite so easy to digest, but in any case just that: an event. And the first real heavyweight in this year.