I Inside the Old Year Dying

Album review

In 1993, PJ Harvey told Melody Maker she didn't get why fans were besotted with her dark, often dangerous sounding lyrics. "It seems silly to me, 'cos they're not poetry, they're not meant to be read," she said. Ironically, the musician's 10th studio album is essentially the audio version of "Olam," a folklore poem Harvey published in 2022. Harvey based the epic in a magical-realist version of Dorset, the craggy English coast that looks sleepy but is the site of centuries of rebellions, uprisings and battles. With producers and longtime collaborators Flood and John Parish, she brings it all to sonically sylvan life. It's the story of nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, growing up on a farm—as Harvey did—in the village of Underwhelem, next to woods protected by the all-seeing eyeball of a lamb named Orlam. The 12 songs represent the calendar cycle of the poem, tracking the last year of Ira-Abel's innocence in a world of old-school pubs, sheep and perversion. While the poem is written in the Dorset dialect, the songs are a mix of Dorset and English, with Harvey often singing from the point of view of the girl. "I think the album is about searching, looking—the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning, Harvey has said. "...The feeling I get from the record is one of love—it's tinged with sadness and loss, but it's loving." Love comes, as it can in childhood, in nonsensical places. There's Orlam, of course, the spirit of her beloved lost lamb, as well as Wyman-Elvis, the ghost of a soldier who represents a sort of Christ-like figure but also The King—as in, Presley. "Are you Elvis? Are you God? Jesus sent to win my trust?" Harvey sings on "Lwonesome Tonight," ethereal as she brings him gifts of Pepsi and "peanut-and-banana sandwiches." Paddington actor Ben Whishaw seemingly embodies Wyman-Elvis on "A Child's Question, August," a dark yet reassuring presence as he joins in for the fairy-tale chorus: "Help me dunnick, drush and dove/ 'Love Me Tender,' tender love." Harvey sounds like a breathy chanteuse on chill opener "Prayer at the Gate," and slightly chaotic on "Autumn Term." "Seen an I" is a capella before the song takes on a Doors moodiness and Harvey finally slips into her more familiar voice. The title track, meanwhile, is most like a classic PJ Harvey song: nervy, on the edge, fueled by the natural power of her voice. That vocal cue is done with intention. "In the lyric everyone is waiting for the savior to reappear—everyone and everything anticipates the arrival of this figure of love and transformation," Harvey has said of the song. "There is a sense of sexual longing and awakening and of moving from one realm into another —from child to adult, from life to death and the eternal." Evocative, shadowy and sometimes sinister, much like Harvey's best work, this catalog entry nonetheless comes with an asterisk: Not for everyone. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz