The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
PJ Harvey · produced by Flood, John Parish, Mick Harvey and PJ Harvey · Island · about 40 minutes
Mode
War song and lament in a light, near-folk idiom, the bright surface set against the dead matter
Mythos
The land that feeds on its dead: the country as body and mother, the rose as the nation, a far hill as a founding sacrifice
Phase
Twelve songs, none an interlude: England, the soldier’s eye, Gallipoli, England’s dark places, and the end in the earth
Presentation
Album; twelve tracks, about forty minutes, recorded in 2010 in St Peter’s Church at Eype, Dorset
Register
Autoharp, guitar, organ, brass and a light, martial kit; a high, thin head voice, and a man’s voice for the last song
Scale
A nation and its wars, held as love and as guilt, through witnesses without faces
Governing Proposition
An English singer sets the First World War and the country that fought it to bright tunes, an autoharp and a thin high voice, with a bugle and a teenage complaint borrowed for comment: love of a land and the killing that made it, sung in one breath, until the record ends in the soil, in a man’s voice, remembering a friend.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins by addressing a country and asking it to shake, and it asks in a bright tune, light enough for a nursery rhyme. “The West’s asleep”, the singer reports, high and almost cheerful, over an autoharp. A record about war opens with a strum and a voice that could be singing to children. That is its method stated in the first song: the matter will be the dead, and the surface will be the songs a nation sings, jaunty, plain and fond. Everything that follows keeps the two in one breath.
Island released the album on 14 February 2011: twelve tracks, about forty minutes, produced by Flood, John Parish, Mick Harvey and PJ Harvey. It was recorded in 2010 in St Peter’s Church at Eype, in Dorset, by a small group: Harvey, Parish, Mick Harvey and the drummer Jean-Marc Butty. Harvey’s autoharp is the record’s ground, with guitar, organ, brass, Harvey herself on saxophone, and a light, often martial kit. She sings almost throughout in a high, thin head voice. On the last song the lead voice passes to Mick Harvey.
The architecture is twelve songs of about three and a third minutes on average, and none of them is an interlude. Three of the titles name England or the land: the first, the third and the seventh. The sequence moves outward and back: England, then the eye of a soldier who has seen men killed, then Gallipoli, then England again and its dark places, and at the end the earth itself. The church is part of the record too, a sacred room with a dry, close sound, and the songs are heard in it as hymns are.
Movement II
The Glorious Land drives, a bugle call cut across a strum, and it asks a question a patriotic song might ask: what does this land grow? It answers plainly. The land’s yield is “deformed children”, and the song goes on singing. The record’s central figure is set down here, early, in its third song: the country’s fruit is its maimed and its dead. The bugle is the sound of ceremony and of the field at once, and the record lays it over a tune that never stops being pleasant.
Before it, The Last Living Rose is a sour, tender hymn to London, its rot and its charm, with brass moving under it that is not heard at first. The tenderness is meant. What the record brings into the open can be stated, and it holds: love of a country cannot be separated from the killing that made it and keeps it, and the patriot’s tenderness and the soldier’s horror are one feeling, felt at the same time. England, the seventh song, is keening, a voice that cannot leave the place it mourns.
Set these words to the sound their subject seems to ask for, dark, heavy and loud, and they would make one more protest record. Set as they are, to bright tunes, an autoharp and a thin high voice, they show how a country carries its wars: in jingles and hymns and songs for children. The horror had been stated before, by the poets of 1914 to 1918 and in the long memory of Gallipoli. What the record adds is the love and the horror sung as one, and the wars of its own years heard, without being named, through the old one.
Movement III
The Words That Maketh Murder is the eyewitness at the core of the record. A soldier has seen men fall “like lumps of meat”, and he tells it in a chant that rises as more voices join it on a playground figure, terrible by its cheerfulness. The song does not raise its voice to match what it has seen. It makes the seeing into something like a game a child might sing in the street, which is how such things are carried and passed on.
Then it ends on a borrowed line, from Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues”, a teenage complaint of 1958, about taking a problem to “the United Nations”: a pop song’s shrug, set after the dead, as the only answer on offer. It is one of several borrowed sounds, among them the bugle of The Glorious Land and the reggae loop that runs under Written on the Forehead, and each is placed so that it reads as citation, not decoration. The production keeps all of it dry and close.
The turn this record makes is from Harvey’s own work. Dry and Rid of Me had been raw blues rock, songs of the private body and its desires; White Chalk, in 2007, had found the piano and the high voice. Here a singer whose name was made on force gives a whole record to England and the First World War, in a light idiom, with samples as irony and a voice held high and plain. The audience that came for intimacy was the stake. The voice had been found before, and the war ballad is old; the turn is of subject and stance, and it is complete.
Movement IV
On Battleship Hill is the record’s height. The voice is pushed to the top of its range over a slow sway, and the hill is given its beauty and its dead in the same line, with “cruel nature” as the verdict of the refrain. It is the coldest elevation on a record whose elevations are all cold: chill and lament, never grandeur. The hill is a real place, at Gallipoli, and the song holds it as a place: its beauty and the dead under it.
Gallipoli enters the record as a founding sacrifice for two other nations, and the record keeps it particular: Battleship Hill is a hill, Anzac a cove. Around it the record builds one pattern and carries it from song to song, the land that feeds on its dead. In the Dark Places sends the young men under the hills; the country is a body and a mother, the rose its emblem. The pattern is as old as the poppy and the soil of Flanders, and the figures who carry it are voices without faces, witnesses rather than persons.
The second half of the record holds to its device more narrowly than the first. Bitter Branches and Hanging in the Wire share one image, soldiers strung across a landscape, and the second adds less than the first; the loop of Written on the Forehead is stiff, and the drumming throughout is plain. England stands among these songs and lifts above them, the voice almost breaking on a single held line. The device does not change across the twelve songs. It does not need to: each time it is applied, the bright tune and the dead matter meet again.
Movement V
The last song gives the record away. The voice passes from Harvey to a man, Mick Harvey, and he sings plainly, in a grief like a hymn, of a friend left in the soil, the earth taking on his colour. A record that began by asking England to shake ends in the ground it began by praising, and the land’s fruit, named in the third song, is now a single person. The thin high voice that carried eleven songs is gone, and what is left is a man remembering.
One law governs the whole: a country’s beauty and its killing sung in one breath, the tune bright and the matter dead. The Last Living Rose and The Colour of the Earth, the record’s two most distant songs, are the same love of a place and its people, once at home and once on a far hill. The range runs from folk waltz and martial drive to hymn, chant and a reggae loop. It is narrow by design, one voice and one device, and the law it serves never breaks.
Fifteen years have tested the record. It won the Mercury Prize in 2011, Harvey’s second, and stood at the head of many lists of its year; Seamus Murphy’s twelve films, one for each song, set it against present-day England; Harvey’s next record, The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016), continued its method. It is heard whole, chiefly by those already close to its maker, and no one song has passed into wide use. What it holds is a nation as love and as guilt, a war and the bodies it broke, the land and the soil as grave. A life, a family and labour are not in it. Within that, the record knows what it knows by how it sounds.
Act III · The Twelve
Twelve songs in about forty minutes, none an interlude, and the subtractive test mostly fails to find a cut. The title track must open, the country addressed and a cheerful tune turned against it. The Glorious Land states the record’s central figure, the land’s yield as maimed children, and must sit early. The Words That Maketh Murder is the eyewitness core; On Battleship Hill sets the record on a named hill of the dead; The Colour of the Earth must close, the voice handed to a man remembering a friend in the soil. The test bites only lightly. Bitter Branches and Hanging in the Wire share one image of soldiers strung across a landscape, and In the Dark Places restates the dead going under the hills. Nothing is padding.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: love of a country cannot be separated from the killing that made and keeps it, and the patriot’s tenderness and the soldier’s horror are one feeling, felt at once. England is a song that cannot leave the place it mourns, and the land’s yield in The Glorious Land is “deformed children”. The eyewitness of The Words That Maketh Murder has seen men fall “like lumps of meat”, and the record answers with a pop song’s shrug. Sound discloses as fully: a bugle over a jaunty strum, a high bright voice carrying carnage, which is how a nation sings about its wars. The war poets had stated the horror; what is uncovered here is the love and the horror joined, and the present wars heard through the old one.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of one cold, eerie kind. On Battleship Hill is the summit: the voice pushed to the top of its range over a slow sway, the hill’s beauty and its dead in one line, “cruel nature” as the refrain’s verdict. The Words That Maketh Murder rises in its chant, many voices on a playground figure, terrible by its cheerfulness. England is keening, the voice almost breaking on a single held line; The Colour of the Earth ends the record in a plain, hymn-like grief. The rest has force more than height. The register holds the figure: the voice is deliberately thin and the arrangements light, so height comes as chill and lament, never as grandeur, and it comes on five or six of twelve songs.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth is built in one pattern and carried across the sequence: the land that feeds on its dead. The Glorious Land asks what the land’s fruit is and answers with maimed children; In the Dark Places sends the young men under the hills; The Colour of the Earth ends with a friend become soil, the earth taking his colour. Around the pattern stand England as a body and a mother, the rose as the nation, Gallipoli as a founding sacrifice for two other nations, and the soldier who sees and cannot forget. The particular stays particular: Battleship Hill is a place, Anzac a cove. The pattern is old, the poppy and the soil of Flanders, and its figures are voices without faces; the record builds on the old myth, and the building is load-bearing.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance: Harvey’s own records, from the raw blues rock of Dry and Rid of Me to the piano and high voice of White Chalk (2007); the English folk ballad and the war song; the rock protest record. The turn is real and whole. A singer whose work had been the private body and its desires gives an entire record to England and the First World War, in a light, near-folk idiom built on autoharp, with samples placed as ironic citation and a voice held high and plain where her name was made on force. The stake was the audience that came for intimacy. The high voice had been found on White Chalk and the war ballad is old; the swerve is of subject and stance, and it was taken in full.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes, because the knowledge lives in the mismatch. Set to the sound the subject seems to ask for, dark, heavy and loud, these words would be one more protest; set as they are, to bright tunes, a thin high voice, an autoharp, a bugle and a line of Eddie Cochran, they show how a country carries its wars, in jingles, hymns and songs for children. The sequence is counted here, once: England, then the soldier’s eye, then Gallipoli, then England’s dark places, and the end in the earth, with the voice handed to a man for the last song. The device is one, applied song by song; in Bitter Branches and Hanging in the Wire it serves the frame without enacting it, and elsewhere it is the instrument of everything the record knows.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence is short, fifteen years, and the figure is a forecast. What evidence there is points to yield. The record is still played whole and returned to; the lyrics invite reading against their sources, the war poets, soldiers’ testimony and the history of Gallipoli; and the borrowed sounds reopen on return, each scrap a small argument about how war is remembered. Seamus Murphy’s twelve films set the songs against present-day England and give a second reading the record holds. In the recording the light arrangements separate into details not heard at first, the brass under The Last Living Rose, the layered voices of The Words That Maketh Murder. Much of the meaning is legible on first hearing and the device is learned quickly; the yield lies in how the parts answer their sources.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the rock and alternative album of its decade, above all in Britain. The intrinsic force: the record showed that a major rock artist could make a whole album on national history and war without the heavy sound and the slogans of protest, through irony of form, borrowed sound and a folk idiom, and be heard widely; it recovered the war song for a public that had nearly lost it, and enlarged what the British album could take up. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record won the Mercury Prize in 2011, Harvey’s second, and was placed at the head of many year-end lists, which is reception; no clear line of records has yet followed its method, and Harvey’s own The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016) continued it. Reach within the field is modest.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifteen years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as released, in print on every format. Presence is continuous but chiefly among critics and listeners already close to Harvey’s work; the record is placed high when its decade is counted and is heard whole, but no one song has passed into wide use. The fabric is little fixed to its year: autoharp, a church room, light drums and brass carry almost no sign of 2011, and the subject, a war a century old, was history when it was sung; the present wars it shadows are left implicit, which protects it. Fifteen years is the whole of the evidence, and the narrowness of the presence holds this axis at the record’s lowest figure; the clean fabric keeps it from falling lower.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing. Harvey holds the high head voice on almost every song, a narrow instrument used exactly, and it carries the record’s argument of bright surface and dark matter; the autoharp gives each song a light frame. The production by Flood, Parish, Mick Harvey and Harvey keeps the sound dry and close, uses the church room, and places each borrowed sound, the bugle, the Cochran line, the reggae loop, so that it reads as citation rather than decoration. Brass and organ are used sparingly. The faults fall on a share of the record: the voice’s thinness sometimes strains toward the fey, the drumming is plain, the loop of Written on the Forehead is stiff, and the second half is less varied in arrangement than the first.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the record: England’s beauty and England’s killing sung in one breath, the tune bright and the matter dead. The two most distant elements obey it. The Last Living Rose, a sour, tender hymn to London, and The Colour of the Earth, a man’s grief for a friend in foreign soil, are the same love of a place and its people, once at home and once on a far hill. The bugles of The Glorious Land and the Cochran shrug of The Words That Maketh Murder are one device, a nation’s sounds turned on its wars. The range, folk waltz, martial drive, hymn, chant and a reggae loop, from England to the trenches and the Aegean, is moderate, and the law never breaks. The tonal range is narrow by design; the coherence is in the law, not the narrowness.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The nation is held fully, as love and as guilt. History is held: the First World War and Gallipoli, with the present wars in shadow. War and the body are held, in soldiers broken on wire and fallen like meat. The natural order is held as the land, the hills, the sea and the earth that takes the dead. The sacred enters as hymn, church and the soil as grave. The orders are joined by one condition and held rather than listed. What holds this axis at the record’s lowest figure: consciousness is a witness’s, not a life; the family, labour and the state as institution are glimpsed or absent; and love is love of country and of one friend.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Inner Law at 9.0, then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, and The Inevitable at 8.8. A form whose knowledge lives in the mismatch of bright tune and dead matter; one law, beauty and killing in one breath, unbroken from London to a far hill; a disclosure that joins the patriot’s love to the witness’s horror as one feeling; a myth of the land that feeds on its dead, built from the third song to the last; and twelve songs, none an interlude, that resist the subtractive test.
Limiting Dimension
The Imperishable and The Encompassed at 8.0: fifteen years of presence, continuous but chiefly among listeners close to its maker, with no song in wide use; and a nation, a war, the body and the land held by one condition, with consciousness a witness’s rather than a life, and the family, labour and the state as institution glimpsed or absent. Next above them, The Sublime and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3: height that comes as chill and lament on five or six of twelve songs, never as grandeur, and a reach that is reception more than redirection.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Imperishable at 8.0 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · the complete album as released by Island on 14 February 2011, twelve tracks in sequence, about forty minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording, its documented making and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand. The album is the unit; Seamus Murphy’s twelve films, live performances and reissues are used only as evidence. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the track timings, the precise recording dates and most session detail, the sources of some of the borrowed sounds, and which songs other than On Battleship Hill are set at Gallipoli, are not given.