PJ Harvey - Let England POLL

the last two were variously bonus tracks/b-sides. included because they're great, particularly "the guns...", which really came into its own for me live.

i have no idea what i'm gonna go for: the songs i found myself obsessively going back to were the opening three, but as an album, it's the "all and everyone"/"on battleship hill" that acts as the most emotionally intense section.

a lot of people seemed particularly enamoured of the last three tracks - i don't dislike them but i don't share that really, many times i stopped playing the album after "bitter branches".

The Words That Maketh Murder, probably.

Hanging In The Wire, so sad & beautiful

Written On The Forehead - that sample is just so utterly devastating and gets me every time, the way it's just slightly out of synch with, and still harmonises perfectly with the weird cycling high notes (I don't know what that is, it sounds like a heavily processed Rhodes or feedback or something?) Love that song so much.

It's very difficult for me to choose. I'd never been a big PJ fan and this album left me cold. I even saw her perform, from a distance, at Primavera this summer an was left unmoved. Then just before Christmas I thought I'd give it another try an lo an behold it suddenly started clicking into place. The first track to make sense was the title track, which is what I voted for in the end, but it seems to reveal a new layer each time I put it on. I love the Summertime Blues referencing on The Words Tha maketh Murder. Also the 'Blood and Fire' sample is especially jarring and smart.

Sorry about typos - iPhone has a logic of its own

battleship

I've been meaning to give this a relisten; it was still my #2 album of 2011 even though I barely listened to it. Like White Chalk I found it conceptually and formally brilliant but difficult to embrace (this could be my Americanness).

That said, I could choose just about every song on here and feel like it was the right decision. Especially one of the first four. Lately I've been listening to "The Words That Maketh Murder" a lot, because I still feel like it's the one that really encapsulates what I find so impressive about the album as a whole. That segue into "Summertime Blues" was maybe the most thrilling thing I heard last year.

"The Glorious Land" seems to me to be one of the greatest songs ever written

gonna say "on battleship hill" for how it seems to find bombast in a very quiet and spare place

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

voted for "All and Everyone" but now "Battleship Hill" is on and I realize i was wrong

Voted "Words That Maketh Murder" because I couldn't help myself, I feel like it synthesizes everything I love about this record in a way the other tracks don't (though "The Last Living Rose" with its "Goddamn European" and its complicated nostalgia comes close)

Went for Written on the Forehead, but it could have been any of them, really.

i voted for the title track in the end - it had to be one of the opening three

The final three beat the opening three for me, so emotionally devastating, but I'm going for On Battleship Hill for her vocal performance alone, it's amazing.

I like White Chalk but could not find a way into this album. I'm interested to see what songs are at the top here.

Strange; that's the opposite of my experience - I found White Chalk distant, hermetically sealed, almost impossible to get into, but I fell for this instantly and hard. I must try WC again.

it was the title track, now it's "the words" but it seems to change every time i listen to it. quite partial to a bit of "battleship hill" right now.

I went with 'Battleship Hill' too, but it changes every day.

I can pretty confidently say that I am not a huge fan of the first song/title track, it sounds kind of goofy and over-thought musically, and the 'wwwooooooo!' vocal inflection doesn't help. Is that the point, to make war or England or whatever sound cartoonish? I feel like I would need to read the lyrics of this album while listening to it, I am so bad at paying any attention to the lyrics when there's some crazy time signature musical hokum going on all around it.

I like the way, on the title track, the word "Bobby" (the first time it's sung) sounds like it's been overdubbed at a later point. Makes it sound disembodied, ghostly, or like a letter away.

really like the video too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Qlb0qFLFE

I feel a bit cheap going for Written on the Forehead for its sonic delights. Battleship Hill and All and Everyone better represent the core of the record and Written is an outlier, but I love it for its warmth and juice. It's also the only song to explicitly address Iraq so the relative modernity of the production fits.

xp I like the video - I am maybe more confused than before about the ideas behind this album though. I feel like there's some greater point that is eluding me, maybe because I never paid attention in school and then essentially my only knowledge of Britishes these days comes from reading this site (something about blood sausage being on the newsie woosies iirc) and so I don't think I'm familiar with any of the context that I suspect I would need to know in order to make sense of what's going on here. I mean, I'm sure you don't have to BE from England to understand or enjoy this album... but I really am a total dunce about the entire country and its history in a way that maybe most ilxorss aren't.

Finally voted for "Bitter Branches." I'm a sucker for those chords.

xpost.

I don't think you need to be aware of the intricacies of England's military history (lord knows I'm not) to be affected by the poetry and the emotion of it. The greater point is just that war is horrible; PJ's just picked some particularly harrowing wars (on a people-level - i.e. killing people up close rather than from miles away with bombs) to paint with.

I can pretty confidently say that I am not a huge fan of the first song/title track

Yeah I think it's the weakest on the album, although it has grown on me.

PJ's just picked some particularly harrowing wars (on a people-level - i.e. killing people up close rather than from miles away with bombs) to paint with.

i think there's a larger point about governmental authority in there - almost every specific reference that locates her songs sets them at gallipoli, which was an unnecessary fiasco of a campaign from the british perspective even within the context of a war motivated by colonial expansionism rather than, um, "morals" (which could be argued for WW2). pj harvey's points about the horrors of war are not general or clichéd - she specifically gets inside the heads and internal lives of the ordinary soldiers who were treated like disposable pawns by their leaders.

towards the end of all that, having chosen a campaign specifically notable for a) themes of colonialism b) the appalling attitude of its leaders to ordinary people, to suddenly and with no warning switching the action to the iraq war is tremendously effective.

i'm so surprised that people prefer the closing three songs to the opening three.

FUCK i have only just now realised the significance of the kurdish sample in "england" - ughhh so obvious. gallipoli was a defeat for the allies but duh a victory for the ottoman empire. the kurdish song sampled is, iirc, a song about love for that country - kurdistan of course doesn't exist, having been swallowed up (and its people oppressed by)...turkey and iraq

Good posts lex.

...and so when she described this album as a "history album", she didn't just mean that it merely documents history, but that the importance of history and all its consequences is at its core...

OTM lex. Also Iraq, like Jamaica, used to be under British control, so even those ostensibly exotic samples end up leading back to England.

within the album: all and everyone
as a standalone track: the glorious land

Might be reading this completely wrong, but The Glorious Land sounds like a call-and-response/dialogue (possibly between anthropomorphic embodiments of England and America). The "Oh America / Oh Eng-er-land" refrain sounds like the two states are in the midst of a sexual act, but the tone shifts on the last line to scolding: "Oh, America!". It's as though America climaxed and then England, disgusted, is saying hypocritically "Look what you've done, shameful! Clean up this mess. You can sleep in the wet spot tonight", even though she was largely responsible for goading America on in the first place.

I also like how there's no response to "How is our glorious land bestowed" - just a silence.

I would rather picture the muddy, bloody corpses of the fallen at Gallipoli than America and England fucking.

looooool

DL otm

America and England fucking

http://www.americanartarchives.com/szyk_john_bull_lib20nov43.jpg

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Missed this poll. I would've made it a tie.

Congrats to Fats Domino

not quite sure if i voted but i would have voted for the winner.

Never noticed the Blueberry Hill ref. do many little references on this record - hurry up and make a 33 1/3

i didn't get a chance to vote in this and now i'm seeing the results--a little surprised if only because colour of the earth has just been destroying me today.

For months that high-pitched hum anchoring "Written on the Forehead" has nagged me. I figured out what it reminds me of: the intro to Van Halen's "When It's Love."

"The Glorious Land" vs "Written On The Forehead" for me.

winner of this poll OTM, that is THE SONG from this album

"In The Dark Places" - no hesitation. The bridge kills me.

"Our Glorious Land" is so, so great

all time

I can't remember if I voted for "On Battleship Hill" or "Written on the Forehead". Not surprising, since I can never make up my mind from week to week which one is better.

I'm surprised "The Colour of the Earth" didn't get any votes, for me that song best represents the lyrical soul of the album (i.e. war sucks).

I love Colour Of The Earth but I reckon it probably suffers from being everyone's second or third favourite. Harrowing delivery of those lyrics. So... calm, and distant.

played this today. my mum asked if it was the ting tings

lol ;_;

'The Words That Maketh Murder' just slays (pun possibly intended) me everytime...

i never got that title. is maketh a name? would it then not be more correct to say the words that murder maketh?

"maketh" is an archaic form of "makes"

basically it's a reference to military orders

thanks. that makes sense then.

Total missed opporunity with "POLLy Jean Harvey"