Everything is shaking. That little voice in your head is telling you something that you cannot quite grasp. In between, the past trudges by, underpinning this existential feeling with archaic images: »I instinctively needed a change of perspective. I had a real yearning inside of me to turn back towards something extremely small – it’s about a person, a forest, a village». PJ Harvey’s new album »I Inside the Old Year Dying» tells of big feelings in small ways: fear of impermanence, a longing for change and a search for something indefinite that never really ends. A lot has happened since the highly political »The Hope Six Demolition Project«. Seven years later, PJ Harvey makes a confession about the melancholy of that time – a dream hidden between fear and anxiety, where we hunger for it most right now. Between the typical folk-rock voice and the sustained instrumentals, the album is littered with field recordings that sneak in between the stories: a bird chirping here, a bell ringing there. What is also heralded in the quiet longing of »Prayer at the Gate» builds to a noiseless din that finally explodes like a volcano in the quiet murmur.
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