I Inside The Old Year Dying
PARTISAN
ALBUM OF THE MONTH 9/10
WHEN PJ Harvey announced the release of I Inside The Old Year Dying, her sense of relief was palpable. The seven-year gap from Harvey’s last record, The Hope Six Demolition Project, was due to a number of factors. One of them was a matter of will. She felt distant from music. The new album was difficult to make, she said, “and took time to find its strongest form”.
That said, Harvey has not been idle these past few years. Now that her musical creativity is burning again, it’s worth taking a moment to examine the route the singer has taken on the road to this obliquely powerful album., and , on which Harvey explored atmospheres, putting her music at the service of the image, adding blusher to the bruises of other people’s stories. There has been a fair bit of self-examination. Harvey’s back catalogue has been reissued, and in demo form too, a process which invites speculation about the recording process itself. The demos oft en have an immediacy, a raw power, which is diminished in the finished recordings. Sometimes it works the other way. When Harvey’s records have tended towards the febrile, the demos betray an intimacy that is less performative. They feel closer to the source.
