I don’t mean to suggest “Let England Shake” is anything other than excellent, but I can’t help thinking that one supplementary reason why PJ Harvey’s latest album has had such laudatory reviews (better, mostly, than the equally good “White Chalk”) is that offers journalists so much to write about. “Let England Shake” is so full of imagery, content, allusion, it offers up boundless possibilities of meaning. Reductively, it has been called a protest album. Expansively, you can parse (or, maybe, project on) it for all manner of ideas about war and nationality.
Plenty of discussion on last week’s Neil Young blog, and also, more fractiously, over at Thrasher’s Wheat, about the value/usefulness/etc of “Archives”.
Turning up at the SonyBMG HQ in London last week to review the new AC/DC album for Uncut, it occurred to me: what on earth am I going to write? I’d heard and blogged already about “Rock’n’Roll Train” and – not for the first time in anticipation of a new AC/DC album – knew what to expect. The challenge would be how to spend 700 words saying little more than, “It sounds the same as all the others, and it’s great.” As it turned out, though, I rather wish now that I’d had that problem.
