By Stuart Mitchner

“What will become of us?” — PJ Harvey

In PJ Harvey’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, the music lifts you up even as the words bring you down. To paraphrase Michelle Obama, when the lyrics “go low, the music goes high.”

During the weeks leading up to the election, I was listening day in day out to Hope Six without fully registering the words. In the election aftermath, Harvey’s dark vision of devastated war zones and the mean streets of Washington D.C. makes timely sense.

“The Community of Hope” begins in Ward Seven of “drug town,” where Benning Road is “a well-known pathway to death,” South Capitol “the highway to death and destruction,” and the “old mental institution” is the Homeland Security base. In “River Anacostia,” the body of water in question flows “with poisons from the naval yard,” and the refrain, now all too pertinent, is “What will become of us?” In “Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln,” a doorway “opens up to the underworld” when a black man hauls trash to a metal hatch. Harvey’s glancing impressions scatter like shrapnel blown by the music, a dense, driving, complex mix of saxophones, keyboards, guitars, primal percussion, and over it all the Emily Brontë of Alternative Rock’s haunting soprano.

The Singing Reporter

The album takes its name from Hope VI, a federal program intended to “revitalize some of the U.S.’s most troubled public housing projects.” In a BBC interview Harvey stresses the documentary aspect of a task undertaken with photojournalist Seamus Murphy. They began in Kosovo and Kabul and finished in Washington D.C. because, as Harvey puts it, that was “the right place to go to tie up the ends: it was where the decisions that affected the faraway places were made …. We ended up spending most of our time in Anacostia, which is south of the river, a very poor part, a rundown neighborhood. I talked to a lot of the people there. I just collected notes as a journalist might. I gather information for songs; my biggest drive is to want to sing to people; that’s the way I get across the things that interest me and concern me.”

The Brontë Connection

One reason I’m thinking of Emily Brontë is that my first listenings to Hope Six coincided with a rereading of Wuthering Heights. More than that, it’s because Harvey’s vocal hovers like an eerie act of nature above the subtly incantatory “River Anacostia” as the poet takes over from the singing reporter with lines like “A small red sun makes way for night, trails away like a tail light.” I wish the real-life residents of Anacostia who find Harvey’s depiction of their down-and-out neighborhood unfair could hear the rapture in her voice when she sings “Oh my Anacostia, do not sigh, do not weep” as if she were mourning the broken heart of her homeland.

I’m not the first to read Wuthering Heights into PJ Harvey. A November 2000 review in Vanity Fair dubbing her “the Emily Brontë of rock’n’roll” found her music similarly “foreboding, intricately designed, and, at times, just a little out of control.” It was also noted that Polly Jean, like Emily, “grew up in the English countryside — in a hamlet just outside of Yeovil.”

You know where Harvey’s roots are when she walks through the National Mall in “Medicinals” thinking how it was once a marshland where sumac, witch hazel, sassafras, and blue stem grass grew, “to soothe our pain, our sores, our troubles.” After the dark undercurrent created by heavy reed-driven backing, the saxes subside for the quietus of a closing coda about a woman in a wheelchair. Singing with a compassion that offsets the political irony, Harvey zooms in on the woman’s Washington Redskins hat worn backwards as she sips “from a bottle a new painkiller for the native people.” While some reviewers have faulted Harvey for resorting to simplistic PC gestures in her lyrics, they discount the passion and power in her singing, qualities I heard for the first time in her previous album Let England Shake, which I reviewed here in January 2012.

Her Native Land

Asked at the time what inspired Let England Shake, Harvey said, “The world we live in.” If anything limits the new album, it’s the fact that she’s taking on the world from a safer distance. For all her imagination and musicianship, she’s still working from a series of observations and impressions. The true greatness of Let England Shake comes out of her visceral “undaunted, never-failing love” for England, or what she referred to at the time as “the push and pull you feel with your native land.” Half a decade ago she had a more binding vision, more a mission than a self-imposed assignment. She viewed herself as “a war songwriter” presenting a war-themed merging of music and imagery, though even then she was implicating the U.S. in the “Oh England/Oh Amerika” chorus of “This Glorious Land.”

Working the Wheel

Harvey comes to Kosovo and Kabul as a compassionate outsider who hears “the children’s cries from the dark” and sees “the ghost of a girl who runs and hides.” Set in Afghanistan, “The Ministry of Defence” is introduced by a bludgeoning Beethoven’s-Fifth-level statement portending the song’s last words, “This is how the world will end.” What she’s seen in a land where “the stairs and walls are all that’s left” and “the bad overwhelms the good” has changed how she regards humankind. Apart from the music, the lyrics of “Line in the Sand,” describe a refugee camp where people kill each other to get first pick of the airdropped supplies. Speaking as if she were an aid worker (“We set up tents, brought in water”), she admits that “by now we should have learned.” The words of the chorus refer to seven or eight thousand killed by hand who “stepped off the edge.” Musically, however, it could almost be a tune sung by kids on a playground.

The songs from Kosovo may be the album’s most fully formed and thought-out. “Chain of Keys” moves with ponderous power, driven by multiple keyboards, percussionists, and two baritone saxophones, its subject an old woman who seems to have stepped off a Tarot card. “Imagine what her eyes have seen,” Harvey sings. The woman has the keys but she keeps her hands behind her back, “she won’t let us in,” and her neighbors won’t be coming home (“Fifteen gardens overgrown, fifteen houses falling down”).

Describing the conception of “The Wheel,” Harvey tells noisey.vice.com, “When I’m writing a song I visualize the entire scene. I can see the colors, 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.”

Upbeat, Alarming, Infectious

“The Wheel” is about disappearing children and a playground ride revolving on chains from which Harvey imagines “four little children flying out.” As in “Line in the Sand,” the music takes on a darkly playful sing-song quality as she chants “now you see them, now you don’t” before the repeated call and response: “hey little children don’t disappear”/”I heard it was 28,000.” As with everything on Hope Six, the music is at once upbeat and alarming, and ultimately infectious, which is to say, again, its lows take you high, it carries you, lifts you, makes you want to sing along, join in, however grim the subject matter, even if it’s “a tableau of the missing tied to a government building, thousands of sun-bleached photographs, fading with the roses.” And then the closing incantation, “and watch them fade out … fade out … fade out … fade out ….”

PJ Harvey’s music knows where we are in these “times that try men’s souls.”

Note: Washington Post reporter Paul Schwartzman gave PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy a tour of D.C.’s Ward 7, the district Harvey wrote about. The album was created in sessions open to the public as part of an art installation at Somerset House in London called Recording in Progress. The sessions ran from Jan. 16-Feb. 14, 2015; the record was released on April 15, 2016. Besides the vocals, Harvey played alto and tenor saxophone, bass harmonica, and autoharp. Supporting musicians included John Parish, Flood, Terry Edwards, Kenrick Rowe, Mike Smith, Mick Harvey, and Jean-Marc Butty.