Seven years after The Hope Six Demolition Project album, Polly returns with mysterious, experimental, beautiful, alluring release in which she adapts poems from her book Orlam into songs immersed in the otherworld-underworld of her home Dorset countryside, laced with local dialect and unusual acoustic instruments. This is a strange, uncertain, shadowy world in which the best way to listen is to just to immerse yourself in the unpredictable oddity and atmosphere. Lwonsome Tonight, for example, features a ghostly Elvis Presley-type character called Wyman-Elvis, who mingles Love Me Tender with Jesus’s teachings. A Child’s Question, August, is also eerily beautiful, perhaps about a girl on the edge of adolescence. There are strikingly vivid lyrics on the school fear song Autumn Term: “I ascend three steps to hell, the school bus heaves up the hill.” With twitching, scratching, wriggling sounds, there’s the feel of tree roots and other lifeforms reaching underground with an impenetrable plot. The album comes decorated with words such as puxy, un-gurrel, clodgy, chawly-wist, clodgy, giltcup, and reddick and Harvey’s goosebumps-inducing voice, delivered in a very different way to the punchy indie of her early 90s work. The process is in part due to her freeform approach with long-term collaborators John Parish and producer Flood. A bizarre, bewildering but beautiful work that proves how she continues to push the boundaries of music, with the title track as delicate and beautiful as anything in her catalogue. Out on Partisan Records.
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