The Hope Six Demolition Project

On this album, Harvey is again sweeping up sonic history and weaving it into a pattern of her own making, but it’s more relaxed and more raucous, its reference points less, appropriately, English. It’s a deeply melodic record.

These eleven joyous anthems and campfire sing-alongs find Harvey striding across fresh stylistic ground. Despite their bleak topicality, vibrant optimism radiates out from lyrical melancholy. Sonic warmth envelops the album like a sumptuous blanket.

Not all of Hope Six is mired in dissonance. Harvey frequently returns to the well of pop music, but the irony of wrapping a grim lyrical message in upbeat music is that those uncomfortable truths become that much harder to overlook.

The Hope Six Demolition Project is yet another remarkable PJ Harvey effort. [No. 130, p.54]

The Hope Six Demolition Project might derive its title from a Housing and Urban Development program designed to “transform public housing,” but the bleak picture Harvey portrays on this stunning album gives that title a second, and more ominous, meaning.

Her music is always so distinctly hers, and she remains one of the most distinctive and thrilling voices we have.

The Hope Six Demolition Project implicates all of the Western world's complacency, making for a complex and challenging, though gorgeous, listen.

Harvey set out to bring listeners and the underprivileged subjects of her record together, and the exciting thing is that that final moment should surely do that.

The strongest songs come at the very end, where Harvey most effectively puts us in the setting she's describing and has the melodies to keep us there.

By anybody else’s standards, it would be a triumph, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Harvey was after something more than a hugely enjoyable, potent-sounding album stuffed with great tunes--in which case, she’ll have to settle for a qualified success.

Harvey sings with unshakeable poise, and her melodies are as sticky as ever--to the point where you can imagine some songs working as barroom singalongs.

We’re left with an album that hides behind the idea of specificity--the title and the lyrical content certainly want you to believe as such--but that ultimately provides a ferocious observation of our lopsided society. It’s also the best out-and-out rock record that Harvey’s made since Uh Huh Her.

It makes you puzzle its meaning, ponder on it, burrow nagging ideas into your head. And it is another stupendous record, of the sort nobody else is making, or probably could make.

One of the chief sources of the album's power is the value it assigns to the act of witnessing, of seeing and taking account of the most vulnerable. [Apr 2016, p.47]

There's an occasional clunkiness and Let England's Shake's visionary fever is lacking. Yet there's an authority in Harvey's voice, her brisk musical and lyrical stride demanding the listener keep up. [May 2016, p.84]

The end result is a heavyweight tour de force, and Polly Harvey's most fully-realised album to date. [May 2016, p.102]

Even when the mood turns slow and swampy on "Chain Of Keys" and "River Anacostia," the intensity never wavers. [May 2016, p.74]

Like its predecessor, Hope's lyrics alone spur startling awe and fierce innovation.

The Hope Six Demolition Project is her most exhilarating rock album in years, yoking the siren-like catchiness of her last great America-influenced album, Stories From the City… to the swamp-tarnished filth of her classic first three records, Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love. It’s leering, brash, and dissonant, but also not without its warmth.

It’s not a “return to rock” (a phrase that probably interests Harvey about as much as “dirt-filled sandwich”), but The Hope Six Demolition Project does contain some of the songwriter’s most guitar-heavy material since the Uh Huh Her days.

It's non-formulaic and filled with a sense of hope and belief. PJ Harvey singing about these things and building to reclamation and salvation is totally worth the trip. For fanboys and those who aren't. We need more of this in the world today.

Whatever your feelings around the words, and they are certainly a little clunky at times, this is a musically rich collection that is partly a logical step on from the rattle of 2011’s beautiful ‘Let England Shake’ and also as melodic a rock record as Harvey has released in some time.

What emerges is one of her most challenging albums, and one of her most urgent.

Befitting its origins, the album's sound is blunt and raw, mixing rock, blues, jazz, spirituals, and field recordings into the musical equivalent of photojournalism.

Project is prime second-tier Polly, opening melodic and textural doors unlike much else you’ll hear in 2016, and it amounts to a lean, compulsively listenable 41 minutes that makes a conscientious effort to do something larger with her gifts.