E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The Mercury Prize, 19 years old, has had a mixed past.  It's chosen duds, and brilliant albums.  What it has done is select the 12 "best" albums of popular music each year, made in Ireland or Britain, from an eclectic genre-list, of avant-jazz to hip hop to nu-folk, and all stops in between.  Famously, PJ Harvey , who won again last night, making her the Don Paterson of the music world, first won exactly a decade ago, on September 11th.  That time, the album was Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea , her finest work, until Let England Shake appeared earlier this year.  It is, as I have written earlier at Eyewear , an album for the ages, one crafted with the sort of literary intelligence we normally associate with poets.  Speaking of Englishness in the context of war and empire, it could not have come at a more apt moment, and to win on the eve of the first decade of 9/11 is an unusually satisfying cultural moment of deserved recognition. ...

PJ Harvey has often made great indie pop, and great experimental albums - but rarely both at once; a few times neither.   Let England Shake is her masterwork, and an early candidate for Album of 2011.  It is, firstly, strange - uncanny - even - and indeed, her unheimlich take on being at home is the purpose of this song cycle, which seeks to locate the roses and fogs of England amidst the carnage the nation's imperial aims have caused; England, for Harvey is a self-harmer.  Harvey's vocals here are falsetto, tremolo - weird - a bit Mercury Rev , a bit J Newsom .  The off-kilter retro stylings of the songs (including male backing singers that sound positively Lawrence Welk ) lend a timeless, thrilling, unsettling quality - as if the inspiring soundtrack was The Singing Detective . Writing of the bloodbath of World Wars - and using 'Strange Fruit' as a model (according to interviews) - Harvey seeks to work through the paradox of an England that is "drunken beatin...