PJ Harvey Enchants in Boston
The British rock queen conquers Beantown
The modern world being what it is, the savvy-rock consumer can pretty much figure out what he or she is going to hear from an artist in concert before the concert: You check www.setlist.fm and there you are.
Concerts being what they are these days — many of the larger ones especially tied to lighting and video cues — there tends to be very minor deviations from the proscribed set list, something that can be both good and bad.
Bad: You lose the illusion of spontaneity. (Yes, it’s mostly an illusion. The band knows what surprises it’s going to pull out.)
But it was good in the case of PJ Harvey, the serpentine 54-year-old British singer and multi-instrumentalist who played MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston Wednesday night 9/18. That’s because Harvey, who sported a long flowing white gown and white boots – and her four-piece band opened with the entirety of her latest album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, played sequentially, from “Prayer at the Gate” to “A Noiseless Noise.” I Inside the Old Year Dying is a tantalizing, oft-ethereal work — on disc and live — but it’s a risky one, and, even for someone for whom risk is expected, it’s not the easiest piece of music for an audience to grasp and groove to. (Maybe, groove to is the wrong choice of words; attempt to internalize and process, perhaps.)
It was, to employ an unfortunately over-used word these days, immersive, seductively and intellectually. There was both theatricality — Harvey’s expressive gesturing and stage-stalking — and a chamber pop intimacy, with electronics, folky instruments and birdsong all playing a part. The lighting came entirely from lights over the stage, no spots. (The audience was in complete darkness until the very end, when lights from the stage spread out upon us, at the close of “To Bring You My Love.” There was a backing scrim that could have been large vines or branches. (We are in a forest.) Stage left a bench to sit on, stage right a chair. Harvey’s mic stand came and went as the need required, whether she was playing an acoustic or electric guitar or roaming the floor, gesticulating dramatically.
The sound? Spooky, bluesy, lots of high-pitched words and whoops from Harvey. Lyrically? Whew. I’ll go with what Pitchfork’s Evan Rytlewski said: “The mythology of I Inside the Old Year Dying is inscrutable even by Harvey’s standards, a nonlinear story told in a language you can’t fully understand.” It’s based to some degree on Harvey’s second book of poetry, Orlam – nope, I haven’t read the book – and uses words and phrases particular to her home base of Dorset. Rather obfuscated, not unlike Cocteau Twins in a way. Whoever invented the term, art-rock years ago, this is probably what they meant. I can’t say I followed Harvey’s journey in any logical sense and only later read the New Yorker’s description: “Orlam tells the fantastical story of a year in the life of Ira-Abel, a nine-year-old girl who seeks solace in flora, fauna, and otherworldly spirits as she struggles to discover who she is and what her life is for. I Inside the Old Year Dying” is a companion piece.”
This was not going to be “easy” listening.
And, yet, one undeniably good thing about this was the audience knew this was Part One of the show. If you accept the challenge of the new material, great. If you’re impatient or put-off by the first part, familiarity will come. The second part of the concert would see Harvey embracing new configurations of her best-known songs, “The Words That Maketh Murder,” “50ft Queenie,” “Man-Size,” “Down by the Water” and “To Bring You My Love” etc. There was no dramatic pause or announcement between the two parts of the show, though Harvey exited as the band played the Celtic-flavored instrumental “The Colour of the Earth.” In fact, Harvey only spoke once, to thank us for coming and introduce the band before “To Bring You My Love”
This is the lineup Harvey has assembled: Longtime mainstay-collaborator John Parish (guitar/keys), James Johnson (keys, violin guitar), Giovanni Ferrario (bass, keys, guitar) and Jean-Marc Buffy (drums). All sing background vocals as well. The approach she’s taking now — her lacerating yowls aren’t so prominent — meant these songs weren’t as full-out rockingly fierce or ferocious as they’ve sometimes been, but they were nevertheless emotionally wrenching. Harvey, in whatever guise, doesn’t really do jubilant. A sense of struggle is everywhere, and it becomes downright chilly and haunting in “Down by the Water” — that drowned child song that closes with “Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water/Come back here, man, gimme my daughter.”
“I’m drawn to the blues,” Harvey told me back in 1993, “because of its simplicity and directness in getting in touch with very raw, basic human emotions. There’s none of this dillydallying around or dressing things up artistically. It’s very immediate and I think I’m in touch with that side – and also the looking, the needing, the searching to kind of make sense of everything.”
She’s still drawn to the blues, certainly, but, yes, she’s now dressing things up artistically. No problem. I rather enjoy that carefully curated dressing.
About 20 minutes after the show ended, fireworks shot up in the sky over Fenway Park. I know it was just the closing of Post Malone’s concert, but in my head, I’d like to think it was for PJ.
VIDEO: PJ Harvey Boston, MA show (full set)
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