Harvey, P.J.: Let England Shake LP

The second album in her catalogue to win the UK's Mercury Music Prize, PJ Harvey's 2011 release Let England Shake was recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset, on a cliff-top overlooking the sea. Featuring the singles "The Words That Maketh Murder" and "The Glorious Land," it was created with a cast of musicians including such long-standing allies as Flood, John Parish and Mick Harvey. It served as the eighth PJ Harvey album overall, following 2007's acclaimed White Chalk, and the Harvey/Parish collaboration A Woman A Man Walked By. What is remarkable about Let England Shake is bound up with its music, its abiding atmosphere, and in particular, its words. If Harvey's previous work seemed to draw on direct emotional experience, this album is rather different. Its songs center on both her home country, and events further afield in which it has embroiled itself. The lyrics return, time and again, to the matter of war, the fate of the people who must do the fighting, and events separated by whole ages, from Afghanistan to Gallipoli. The album they make up is not a work of protest, nor of strait-laced social or political comment. It brims with the mystery and magnetism in which she excels. But her lyric-writing in particular has arrived at a new, breathtaking place here, in which the human aspects of history are pushed to the foreground. Put simply, not many people make records like this. The reissue is faithful to the original recording and package, cutting by Jason Mitchell at Loud Mastering under the guidance of original co-producer John Parish.