PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying album review — intimate songs based on epic poems

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Of the many accents in the British Isles, those from the West Country are among the most under-represented in pop songs; this despite the region having one of the UK’s music hubs, Bristol. I suspect the dearth is linked to a patronising association with yokel comedy. Just as basses are assigned the roles of buffoon or villain in opera, so West Country voices are treated as clownish in the pageantry of national life. The locals don’t always help their cause in this respect: witness The Wurzels, the unambiguously Somerset-accented purveyors of fare such as “I Am a Cider Drinker”. 

PJ Harvey grew up in Dorset, near the Somerset border. She speaks in a West Country accent, but doesn’t sing with one. This presents an interesting dilemma for her first album in seven years. I Inside the Old Year Dying is based on her book of narrative poems, Orlam, published to acclaim last year. They’re written in Dorset dialect, so that world becomes “wordle” and singing is “zingen”. The lyrics in the album’s 12 tracks are taken from the poems. Does that then mean they should be zung not sung?

The answer turns out to be a qualified yes. Harvey doesn’t go the full Wurzels, but there’s a distinctly West Country twang to certain songs. In “A Child’s Question, July”, she takes the part of a child in the Dorset village where the poems are set, doing an enigmatic call-and-response routine with longtime collaborator John Parish. His murmured vocal channels the shadowy style of Bristol rapper Tricky. For the mournfully haunted country-blues of “Lwonesome Tonight”, she switches to a high register for the role of a teenage girl yearning for a tryst. Her soprano lilts and curves through the inflections of a vividly evoked Dorset landscape.

How to sing was a tricky issue for her while making the album, which has been a long time coming since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project. Parish and another trusted figure, the producer Flood, stopped her from singing in her “PJ Harvey voice”, according to Harvey herself. The Dorset-accented songs chime with her speaking self instead, a Polly Jean Harvey voice. Others find her singing the dialect verses in the received pronunciation of standard English, but in different actorly tones. 

The music is stronger on atmosphere than structure; its mood is powerful and lingering. “The Nether-edge” has an uncanny electronic throb, while “Seem an I” unfolds with crabby post-punk motions. Like Thomas Hardy’s revival of the lost kingdom of Wessex in his novels, this is Harvey’s West Country dreamland.

★★★★☆

‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ is released on Partisan Records