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Jul 19, 2023With expressive restraint, key collaborators John Parish and Flood utilise instruments and field recordings to tactile effect, while leaving room for Harvey’s voice to resonate. The results hold their folk-horror secrets close and harbour dark suggestions on investigation.
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Jul 5, 2023As the title suggests, I Inside the Old Year Dying feels like a product of Harvey cocooning, burrowing into a space that feels protected and unhinged from relevance or topicality, as time and space wither. With that she has produced her most beguiling work.
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Jul 7, 2023A triumph in its own right, I Inside the Old Year Dying's lively exploration is also a rekindling of something vital in Harvey's art in general. Though its whispers and shadows may not reveal everything, they're more than enough for a fascinating listening experience.
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Jun 29, 2023Hark! I Inside the Old Year Dying is a singular thing. [Aug 2023, p.18]
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Jul 14, 2023I Inside the Old Year Dying has the hallmark of an album that will only get better with age.
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Jul 12, 2023As a piece of esoteric yet engrossing art, I Inside The Old Year Dying marks one of Harvey’s finest creations yet.
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Jul 10, 2023This record transports listeners through an intensely vivid journey, presenting a different side to PJ Harvey’s creative genius, one that proves profound art cannot be forced.
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Jul 5, 2023Musically, the deft fusion of the delicate and the hearty reflects Harvey’s thematic explorations; the production is full of strange quirks, whether found sounds or unusual effects that are sometimes inserted and not repeated. The effect is that the music feels both hazy and alive, evoking the Orlam world in its strange splendour.
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Jul 18, 2023The instrumental parts patiently map out their terrain, Harvey intones her vivid poetry, often backed by long-time collaborator John Parish’s affecting voice, then the song will stand aside. It’s only on repeat listens and by drawing threads between the individual songs that the beauty of the whole begins to take form.
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Jul 12, 2023It may be a hard record to get a finger on, particularly compared to her last decade or so of releases, but I Inside The Old Year Dying, is another strong record in a discography already stacked with classics.
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Jul 11, 2023‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ will likely take some time to fully unravel, but on the surface, it looks like a daring return.
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Jul 10, 2023The album finds a comfortable middle ground between the warmth of your own bed after a long vacation and the anxiety of entering a new era in your life. She deploys just enough ambiance to keep us listening without distracting from her overall message, allowing the hushed melodies and simplistic arrangements to thrive under the all-encompassing creativity of its creator.
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Jul 10, 2023This might not be Harvey’s most immediate collection, but it’s as fascinating and rewarding as ever.
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Jul 7, 2023Here’s what I Inside the Old Year Dying is: beguilingly atmospheric, beautifully crafted, and yet more proof that PJ Harvey is one of our most idiosyncratic artists. It’s wyrd, for sure. But it’s also lwovely.
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Jul 6, 2023Many of the songs, which she recorded with longtime collaborators John Parish and producer Flood, recall the downtempo energies of Let England Shake and her quiet 2007 album, White Chalk, and like those albums, the music here excels in its otherworldliness.
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Jul 6, 2023I suspect that those who’ve always found Harvey a chore will find much to mock. But her fans will be all in for this mucky pagan whirl.
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Jul 5, 2023While one of her least immediate records, it stands as one of her most rewarding.
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Jul 5, 2023While the meaning part is sometimes tough to decipher – far more so than her previous work – it’s not the answer here that’s important but the journey. It takes a little time to immerse yourself in Harvey’s world, but once there, you won’t want to leave.
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Jun 29, 2023I Inside the Old Year Dying holds itself at the biting point between old and new, re-evaluation and revelation. What lies on the other side, only Polly Harvey knows, but this is a record she was born to make. [Aug 2023, p.76]
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Jun 29, 2023Like the Dorset woods they describe, I Inside the Old Year Dying is eerily forbidding, but intoxicating, and easy to lose yourself in.
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Jul 13, 2023Dying’s sinewy strangeness may come at the expense of the immediacy that was once Harvey’s strong suit, but this is how PJ Harvey albums work now: You feel them without being able to explain them. Where her early records pummeled the gut, now she toys with the mind.
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Jul 6, 2023It’s undoubtedly a confounding and unorthodox piece of work, but its artistic integrity and single-mindedness still manages to ensure PJ Harvey somehow comes out of it with her reputation enhanced.
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Jul 6, 2023The music throughout I Inside the Old Year Dying rattles and quakes in stark contrast with Harvey’s studiously composed intellectual exercises. Which is to say, this is an album that gives about as much as it asks in return, even if its medieval trappings and intentional obfuscation do risk letting listeners walk away feeling more bewildered than moved.
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The WireJun 29, 2023There’s a consistent low level sense of discomfort, or of familiar sounds or words taking on bizarro parallel forms. Lyrically, the album is enigmatic, full of personal mythologies, and swings between the divine (Jesus, Elvis) and the domestic (schools, peanut butter sandwiches). The song titles are a puzzle of repeated words and variations of phrases, like a secret language in plain sight. All over the album are sounds that can’t easily be identified, or that sit in between recognisable timbres. [Jul 2023, p.52]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 21
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Mixed: 3 out of 21
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Negative: 2 out of 21
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Jul 8, 2023
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Jul 9, 2023Really interesting stuff. Took a few listens but it sits nicely with the rest of her discography.
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Aug 22, 2023