Let England Shake

Official Review

After her previous album, the more intimate and vocally experimental White Chalk, Polly Jean Harvey moves into completely different territory: a choral portrait of the English nation, built through historical research, readings on Gallipoli and the First World War, and a vocal register shifted into an almost childlike falsetto that deliberately clashes with the harshness of the lyrics. Recorded in a nineteenth-century church in Dorset with John Parish and Mick Harvey, the album samples fragments of vintage folk and military songs for the first time in her career, embedded within arrangements of autoharp, distorted electric guitar, and brass. The Words That Maketh Murder constructs an almost grotesque nursery rhyme over explicit war imagery — "severed limbs hanging from trees" sung with a nursery-rhyme tone — while The Glorious Land literally samples a military bugle call as its intro, immediately followed by lyrics that sarcastically ask what England grows today ("orphans and widows? cannons, airplanes, tanks"). England works on a distorted sample of a traditional Albanian song, processed until it becomes unrecognizable, while On Battleship Hill describes the battlefields of Gallipoli from the perspective of the landscape itself, which has by now reabsorbed every human trace of the massacre. The connection to Jean Baudrillard here is precise: the album treats the nation as a symbolic construction that reassembles itself through its own foundational myths — the Great War, imperial identity, the idealized rural landscape — re-presented as signs that have long since ceased to point to a stable real referent. Let England Shake stages, without ever taking an explicit stance, the very mechanism of contemporary identity rebirth — the evocation of past glory, the mourning for something vague and irretrievable, the nation as a wounded body demanding to be avenged — while remaining a record written with a critical, rather than celebratory, intent. Let England Shake won the Mercury Prize in 2011, the second of Harvey's career after Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and remains the album that definitively shifted her songwriting toward historical-political terrain, prefiguring the even more explicitly journalistic work of her subsequent The Hope Six Demolition Project.