★★★★½
Any record that makes politicians nervous must be doing something right.
The Hope Six Demolition Project is so vicious – so unreservedly fed up with the disparity between life in the Third and First Worlds – that the former mayor of Washington, D.C. felt compelled to describe the work as “inane”. This machine kills fascists indeed, though rather than Bob Dylan’s acoustic, PJ Harvey has armed herself with an electric guitar, a saxophone, and page after page of acerbic poetry.
Given its political intent and bone-rattling sound, some will view the record as Let England Shake part two, but so extreme is Hope Six’s dissatisfaction that it makes Harvey’s last record seem like a polite request by comparison. This is brutal, uncompromising stuff, with ‘The Ministry Of Defence’ and ‘The Wheel’ in particular screeching through the record like a flaming car hurtling through a warzone.
Not that the record is one-note, mind you – ‘Dollar, Dollar’ brings to mind the simple horror of Pablo Neruda’s I’m Explaining A Few Things, its sonic simplicity the equivalent of Neruda’s line about “the blood of children … [running] through the streets like children’s blood.”
In that way, Hope Six is a genuinely significant record: less an auditory distraction and more a kind of memorial, a blood-soaked spire pointing straight up.
