PJ Harvey began the 2010s with Let England Shake, a strikingly prescient masterpiece that touched on thorny issues -- nationalism, war, the complex relationship one can have with one's homeland -- that only grew more fraught and more relevant as the years passed. In its finished, Mercury Prize-winning form, the album draws on all of Harvey's experience as it breaks new artistic ground: Dry's folk-inspired narratives, Rid of Me's intensity, the globe-trotting tales of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and the unearthly terror of Is This Desire? and White Chalk can all be heard in its sweep. Let England Shake: The Demos offers a parallel universe version of the album that throws its extremes of beauty and ugliness, compassion and cruelty, into sharp relief. Arguably, it's a scarier listen; the demo of "The Glorious Land" sounds even more like a twisted version of the kind of patriotic songs children learn in school, and "On Battleship Hill" affords more space for Harvey's keening soprano to evoke decades of lingering pain. As is often the case on her demo albums, her voice is the main attraction on Let England Shake: The Demos. Her crone-like wail on "England" speaks to an anguished love that's greater and more painful than any romance chronicled on her previous records. It's a mood she interprets in a more contemporary way on an almost fully formed version of "The Last Living Rose" that makes for one of the best songs on either version of Let England Shake. Harvey's use of samples as a metatext also stands out more plainly on her initial recordings for the album, underscoring the connections these songs have to the world around them. The loop of the Four Lads' "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" that underpins the title track provides an ironic nod to changing cultural mores and adds a jarring contrast to her creaky voice, a technique she repeats on "The Words That Maketh Murder" by juxtaposing Eddie Cochran's jaunty "Summertime Blues" with grisly battlefield imagery. Elsewhere, Let England Shake: The Demos makes it easier to admire the arcs of the album's songs. The verses of "All and Everyone" march forward relentlessly, hitting home the almost journalistic detail of Harvey's lyrics, while its weightless choruses seem to stop time altogether. Similarly, the loping melody of the stripped-down "The Colour of the Earth" captures how remembering trauma can make the years vanish. In its own way, Let England Shake: The Demos is as haunting as the finished version of the album. It's notable that Harvey used more or less the same process to sketch out her ideas for these songs as she did for Dry nearly 20 years prior -- and more notable still that the demos for her later work are just as surprising and rewarding for fans. © Heather Phares /TiVo

PJ Harvey followed her ghostly collection of ballads, White Chalk, with Let England Shake, an album strikingly different from what came before it except in its Englishness. White Chalk's haunted piano ballads seemed to emanate from an isolated manse on a moor, but here Harvey chronicles her relationship with her homeland through songs revolving around war. Throughout the album, she subverts the concept of the anthem -- a love song to one's country -- exploring the forces that shape nations and people. This isn't the first time Harvey has been inspired by a place, or even by England: she sang the praises of New York City and her home county of Dorset on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Harvey recorded this album in Dorset, so the setting couldn't be more personal, or more English. Yet she and her longtime collaborators John Parish, Mick Harvey, and Flood travel to the Turkish battleground of Gallipoli for several of Let England Shake's songs, touching on the disastrous World War I naval strike that left more than 30,000 English soldiers dead. Her musical allusions are just as fascinating and pointed: the title track sets seemingly cavalier lyrics like "Let's head out to the fountain of death and splash about" to a xylophone melody borrowed from the Four Lads' "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," a mischievous echo of the questions of national identity Harvey explores on the rest of the album (that she debuted the song by performing it on the BBC's The Andrew Marr Show for then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown just adds to its mischief). "The Words That Maketh Murder" culminates its grisly playground/battleground chant with a nod to Eddie Cochran's anthem for disenfranchised '50s teens "Summertime Blues," while "Written on the Forehead" samples Niney's "Blood and Fire" to equally sorrowful and joyful effect. As conceptually and contextually bold as Let England Shake is, it features some of Harvey's softest-sounding music. She continues to sing in the upper register that made White Chalk so divisive for her fans, but it's tempered by airy production and eclectic arrangements -- fittingly for an album revolving around war, brass is a major motif -- that sometimes disguise how angry and mournful many of these songs are. "The Last Living Rose" recalls Harvey's Dry-era sound in its simplicity and finds weary beauty even in her homeland's "grey, damp filthiness of ages," but on "England," she wails, "You leave a taste/A bitter one." In its own way, Let England Shake may be even more singular and unsettling than White Chalk was, and its complexities make it one of Harvey's most powerful works.© Heather Phares /TiVo

PJ Harvey began the 2010s with Let England Shake, a strikingly prescient masterpiece that touched on thorny issues -- nationalism, war, the complex relationship one can have with one's homeland -- that only grew more fraught and more relevant as the years passed. In its finished, Mercury Prize-winning form, the album draws on all of Harvey's experience as it breaks new artistic ground: Dry's folk-inspired narratives, Rid of Me's intensity, the globe-trotting tales of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and the unearthly terror of Is This Desire? and White Chalk can all be heard in its sweep. Let England Shake: The Demos offers a parallel universe version of the album that throws its extremes of beauty and ugliness, compassion and cruelty, into sharp relief. Arguably, it's a scarier listen; the demo of "The Glorious Land" sounds even more like a twisted version of the kind of patriotic songs children learn in school, and "On Battleship Hill" affords more space for Harvey's keening soprano to evoke decades of lingering pain. As is often the case on her demo albums, her voice is the main attraction on Let England Shake: The Demos. Her crone-like wail on "England" speaks to an anguished love that's greater and more painful than any romance chronicled on her previous records. It's a mood she interprets in a more contemporary way on an almost fully formed version of "The Last Living Rose" that makes for one of the best songs on either version of Let England Shake. Harvey's use of samples as a metatext also stands out more plainly on her initial recordings for the album, underscoring the connections these songs have to the world around them. The loop of the Four Lads' "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" that underpins the title track provides an ironic nod to changing cultural mores and adds a jarring contrast to her creaky voice, a technique she repeats on "The Words That Maketh Murder" by juxtaposing Eddie Cochran's jaunty "Summertime Blues" with grisly battlefield imagery. Elsewhere, Let England Shake: The Demos makes it easier to admire the arcs of the album's songs. The verses of "All and Everyone" march forward relentlessly, hitting home the almost journalistic detail of Harvey's lyrics, while its weightless choruses seem to stop time altogether. Similarly, the loping melody of the stripped-down "The Colour of the Earth" captures how remembering trauma can make the years vanish. In its own way, Let England Shake: The Demos is as haunting as the finished version of the album. It's notable that Harvey used more or less the same process to sketch out her ideas for these songs as she did for Dry nearly 20 years prior -- and more notable still that the demos for her later work are just as surprising and rewarding for fans. © Heather Phares /TiVo