FEATURE:
The Hope Six Demolition Project at Five
PJ Harvey’s Finest Cuts
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I like celebrating quite big album anniversaries…
and, even though PJ Harvey’s ninth studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, is five tomorrow (15th April), I feel it is worth marking! I think that the album is quite underrated and warrants new inspection. Prior to the album’s release, this is how PJ Harvey’s official website announced the release:
“This spring sees the release of PJ Harvey’s ninth studio album,
The Hope Six Demolition Project, on April 15th through Island Records.
The Hope Six Demolition Project draws from several journeys undertaken by Harvey, who spent time in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, D.C. over a four-year period. “When I’m writing a song I visualise the entire scene. I can see the colours, I can tell the time of day, I can sense the mood, I can see the light changing, the shadows moving, everything in that picture. Gathering information from secondary sources felt too far removed for what I was trying to write about. I wanted to smell the air, feel the soil and meet the people of the countries I was fascinated with”, says Harvey.
The album was recorded last year in residency at London’s Somerset House. The exhibition, entitled ‘Recording in Progress’ saw Harvey, her band, producers Flood and John Parish, and engineers working within a purpose-built recording studio behind one-way glass, observed throughout by public audiences”.
I am going to end this feature with a selection of the best PJ Harvey cuts. I know I have included a Harvey playlist before but, as her latest studio album is five, it is worth coming back to her fabulous music! In their review of The Hope Six Demolition Project, this is what The Guardian wrote:
“Tellingly, The Hope Six Demolition Project is better still when Harvey hands over the songs’ narrative voice to others. The Community of Hope more or less transcribes a Washington Post journalist’s running commentary while driving Harvey around the city’s roughest neighbourhoods, perfectly capturing the point where impotent hopelessness – “This is just drug town, just zombies, but that’s just life … the school just looks like a shithole” – collapses into cynicism: “They’re gonna put a Wal-Mart here,” it concludes, in a rousing massed chorus. A Line in the Sand, meanwhile, is flatly terrifying. This time the voice is of a worker in a refugee camp, detailing the horrors he’s seen – refugees murdering each other over air-dropped food, “a displaced family eating a cold horse’s hoof” – the whole thing somehow rendered bleaker still by the fact that Harvey sings his words to a jaunty, skipping melody, in a blithe, high-pitched voice.
The Hope Six Demolition Project is full of moments like that, where the experiment unequivocally works, to pretty devastating effect. Even when it doesn’t – when the words seem a little hollow or heavy-handed, attended by a distinct hint of think-about-it-yeah? – it’s still a hugely enjoyable album, potent-sounding, stuffed with tunes great enough to drown out the occasional lyrical shortcomings. By anybody else’s standards, it would be a triumph, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Harvey was after something more than a hugely enjoyable, potent-sounding album stuffed with great tunes – in which case, she’ll have to settle for a qualified success”.
To mark the fifth anniversary of one of the world’s greatest artist’s current studio album, the playlist below combines some of PJ Harvey’s very finest tracks. As you will hear, when it comes to the music of Polly Jean, she has been releasing stunning music since the start. She truly is…
A musical treasure.