A folk story, an enchantress’s hymn book, an ancient script – PJ Harvey’s 10th album is a little of each of these, as wispy as vapour but with a beguiling, swamp-like suction to it dragging you into the slop.
Like every PJ Harvey album, it doesn’t sound anything like its predecessors – her most recent album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, was a weighty record reporting from warzones and social discord with crunchy guitars and unsettling brass – I Inside… could not be more different as it dances along, sung in Dorset vernacular and with vast realms of space for the words to flow in and out of.
Lyrically, it is based on Orlam, Harvey’s book of verse published last year and telling the story of a nine-year-old girl named Ira-Abel Rawles as she begins to shed the innocence of childhood, month by month, over the course of a year.
Songs feel like they have come from another world – or at least another time – wobbling into focus as Harvey’s voice transforms from wavering high notes to entrancing low ones on the title track. You can feel the effort she has put into transforming her voice: the only time it feels unrestrained is on the concluding track, “A Noiseless Noise”.
The album is a kind of funeral march for childhood, the death of youth echoed in the music which becomes darker and harder as the album progresses. There is something comforting about it as a record even as you struggle to decipher the words as they skate over the music. Sometimes it feels as though you are a snake being charmed out of a basket by the rhythmic pulse and Harvey’s sometimes confounding incantations: you might not be completely clear about what is going on but you are compelled to embrace it anyway.
Songs to stream: I Inside The Old I Dying, A Noiseless Noise, All Souls
