Album Review: Let England Shake - PJ Harvey

*****

Sneak home and pray you'll never know/The hell where youth and laughter go - Siegfried Sassoon

Let England Shake certainly owes much to the war poets, conjuring as it does horrific tales of young men cast into the hellish nightmares of trench warfare.

However, whereas it would be all too easy for these 12 tracks to descend into cliché, in fact, and against the odds, PJ Harvey has crafted a work that not only sits as a tactful testament to the fallen but is a fitting tableau of humanity's multi-faceted struggle against self-destruction.

Throughout the album, the presence of nature is felt very strongly, the massacre and the killing inked indelibly onto the landscape, whether the stench of death "coming off the mounds of Bolton's Ridge" or the "Jagged mountains, jutting out, cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth."

On Battleship Hill, from which that last line is taken, is perhaps the most interesting track in this regard, not merely lamenting the cruel nature of man but also championing humanity's resolution (or is it begrudging war's futility?); eventually, despite the devastation, "The land returns to how it's always been."

It's also possible to draw parallels, not only with Iraq or even the current conflicts in the rest of the Middle East - "What if I take my problem to the United Nations", stolen from Eddie Cochrane on The Words That Maketh Murder - but with the global population's ongoing battle with Mother nature, whether that be climate change or other natural hazards beyond human influence.

Neither does Let England Shake deny the inherent romanticism of war, especially on All And Everyone, where the lines, "As we advancing/In the sun" ring out against a melodramatic musical backdrop that, to me, evokes images of the final scenes of British sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth.

It's evidence of Harvey's particular genius; not merely pedaling the truism that war is bad, but also empathising with man's plight and never assuming a moral high ground.

Of course, the album's other main theme is the resonance of England's chequered past. Harvey's relationship with her homeland is clearly troubled, at first appearing to romanticise the "battered books" and "fog rolling" on Last Living Rose but in the next breath clearly lamenting its "stinking alleys" and "drunken beatings".

This is revisited on the straightforwardly titled track England, the weight of a nation's failings leaving a 'bitter taste' but like 'roots from a vine', the connection with her homeland, for all its faults, is constant. "To you, England, I cling/Undaunted, never failing, love for you".

It's a tightrope that Harvey walks with Let England Shake but it's too her great credit that the subject matter is handled in such a delicate, ambivalent way as to truly replicate the complexities of war - the line between right and wrong being often blurred in extremis and our loyalties to each other and our country questioned at every turn.