PJ Harvey
I Inside the Old Year Dying

I approach listening to the record at the end of August, precisely the period to which PJ Harvey refers multiple times both in the lyrics and the sounds of this much-anticipated I Inside the Old Year Dying. The first tracks seem to confirm the characteristics that were already apparent in the singles, namely, a great exploration in sounds and arrangements and the use of a high-flown, almost epic English; however, the beginning seems an uphill struggle, with tracks that do not fully convince on the compositional front, almost leaving a suspicion that the aforementioned stylistic choices serve to hide—albeit with great taste and intelligence—a certain compositional and ideational poverty: I refer, for example, to Autumn Term, which struggles to gain momentum, and the rhapsodic but unconvincing Seem an I.

And then arriving at the middle of the album, when enthusiasm and expectations towards the album seem to definitively wane, the title track I Inside the Old Year Dying arrives: short, incisive, and essential, capable of shedding a different light on all the baroque elements that weigh down the previous songs and here instead frame the beauty of the track. The rest of the album is on the rise: all those embellishments and that strange lexicon progressively make more and more sense and definition; even the more articulated tracks like All Souls turn wonderfully, the compositional ideas are more focused, and the sophisticated arrangements further support them. The two singles we already knew and which had created some hype about the rest of the album also arrive, namely, A Child’s Question, August and I Inside the Old I Dying, which, even when placed in the broader context of the album, do not lose a gram of their beauty and brilliance.

Overall, the verdict on the album can only be positive on all fronts (compositional, instrumental, and literary); however, the strong imbalance between the first part of the record, tired and a bit weak, and the second one, extremely valuable, is surprising, although probably the tracklist in Harvey's project is more bound by narrative necessities and hypertextual references between the tracks rather than their effective balance.

Ultimately, an album without great peaks but whose strength lies in its entirety, just like the most successful concept albums, and therefore capable of creating a deep and detailed musical world that gains value in its being a “work,” and not a mere collection of tracks; and perhaps it is precisely “works” and worlds that today’s music world needs.