The Sampler: PJ Harvey, Karl Steven, Hand Habits

Tony Stamp reviews an adaptation of an epic poem, a selection of local remixers, and a playfully profound folk-pop EP.

I Inside the Old Year Dying by PJ Harvey

It’s always interesting to see how artists known for rock n roll bluster adjust their output as they age: Trent Reznor pivoted into soundtrack work, as did Nick Cave. Many lower the volume and up the ballads, and even more keep doing the same thing to diminishing returns.  

Polly Jean Harvey began her solo career at the start of the nineties with an immediately distinctive scorched earth sound, and while each subsequent album saw her exploring new avenues, it was 2007’s White Chalk that seemed to mark the start of a new direction.

Her latest sees her challenging herself in various ways, with results that are appropriately tortured, and frequently gorgeous.

In 2022 Harvey published the epic poem Orlam, which covers a year in the life of a nine-year-old girl in Dorset. It’s mythic and fantastical, and written in Dorset vernacular. I watched a clip of her reading an extract, and as an example, one line features the words ‘sooneres’, ‘eltroot’, and ‘meesh’.

She spent eight years working on Orlam, and after considering an adaptation for the stage, decided it would form the basis of this album. It’s why a track like ‘Autumn Term’ features lines like, “Woody nightshade, drooped her beads, An' bade, come feed on these”.

On some of these songs, Harvey’s voice is joined by co-producer John Parish’s, or those of actors Ben Wishaw and Colin Morgan, who joined the project when it was going to be a play. It speaks to her creative views that she’s willing to share space with singers much less gifted than she is. Whoever is doubling her on that song does lend it a slightly creepy factor.

She spoke to The Guardian about wanting to sing in different ways, and enlisting producers Flood and Parish - who she’s worked with on and off since her third album - to stop her singing in what she identified as her “PJ Harvey voice”. She described the process as like inhabiting different characters on each song.

Despite recognising that a folk music aesthetic would suit this material well, Harvey tried to avoid it, wanting everything outside the lead instrument and voice to be “unidentifiable and strange”. She refers to the world she created as magical, and mystical.

The title track does feature an acoustic guitar, as do many of these tunes. But it’s bashed in a way similar to her punk beginnings and includes washes of noise, periodic distorted percussion, and the type of haunted, high-register melody that’s this album’s signature.

Three songs later, one called ‘I Inside the Old I Dying’, is similarly insistent, leading to one of the collection’s most engaging choruses. 

There’s a quality to this album that sounds like its creators worked hard at - one that mixes more considered elements with others that feel off the cuff. It’s been present in PJ Harvey’s work since 1995’s To Bring You My Love, which was also produced in conjunction with Flood and John Parish. 

A good example is the use of field recordings. The sounds of the outside world were brought into the studio and played back live while Harvey and Parish improvised around them, and this approach seems to extend to the whole process, giving I Inside the Old Year Dying an appropriately wild and woolly feeling. 

It’s a record that was heavily laboured over, but never feels like it, and PJ Harvey emerges sounding the same as always, but completely different.

All of Human Emotion on Microfiche (The Remixes) by Karl Steven

It wasn’t always a sure thing that the debut album by Karl Steven, co-frontman for Supergroove, would come out at all. He created its tracks during moments when his output as a screen composer wasn’t flowing, and it was Auckland indie label Sunreturn who encouraged him to collect and release them. 

Which brings us to the subsequent remix album, on which a selection of electronic musicians from around Aotearoa present their takes on the material. It represents a nice intergenerational exchange of ideas.

Tāmaki trio Grecco Romank’s rework of ‘The Message’ replaces Steven’s voice with their own, and supercharges its rhythm with some industrial beats. Jess Chambers, who lives between NZ and Nashville, Tennessee, and makes music as Dream Chambers, also adds her voice to proceedings on a version of ‘Cold Day Light’, dueting and harmonising with samples of Steven, to lovely effect.

Meanwhile Gayblade - a duo made up of artists Amamelia and Baby Zionov - offer their take on ‘Utterance and Inscription’, working in a genre called Dungeon Synth, which broadly speaking is dark ambient music with ties to fantasy and mediaeval imagery.

Steven, who helpfully shared his thoughts on the Sunreturn Instagram, called it “somehow at once beautiful and hilarious”.  

The biggest surprise here comes courtesy of Proteins of Magic, AKA Kelly Sherrod, who usually outputs delicate, slightly gothic electronica, but here amps up ‘Tāmaki 5000’ into the album’s most jubilant cut. They take Steven’s slightly sinister love/ hate ode to Auckland, thicken the drums considerably, and add a lot of synths and silliness. 

In that Instagram post, Karl Solve Steven is touchingly grateful to all the remixers, and also says he was “both scared and embarrassed to give them [his] musical children to raise”. It’s a reminder that artists who’ve been doing it for a while can still feel vulnerable, and makes me wonder if the younger musicians felt similarly. 

There's no sense of trepidation in this audio though; if anything I get a sense of gratitude. To close things out Liam K Swiggs takes a background synth loop from ‘Acoma (Phase ll)’ and grafts it to a drum n bass rhythm, an appropriately celebratory note to end on.

Sugar the Bruise by Hand Habits

Delve into the bio of New York-born musician Meg Duffy and you’ll find a list of buzzed-about indie acts. As a session musician they’ve played with The War on Drugs, Perfume Genius, Weyes Blood, Kevin Morby and plenty more, and in 2012 launched their own project Hand Habits. 

Duffy has always been one to dabble outside their comfort zone, and their record Fun House from last year was Hand Habits’ most eclectic offering, till now. This new EP ranches out in several new directions but feels like a complete statement, rather than a collection of songs.

Duffy’s songwriting is thoroughly accomplished, often skirting around Fab Four territory but always dallying down unexpected pathways. In a statement they said they wanted to take their music “somewhere more playful”, which comes through in the way tracks like 'Andy in Stereo' jump between time signatures and arrangements. 

‘Something Wrong’ has an ominous title, and lyrics like “I’m begging you to understand”, but there are irreverent elements throughout - booming drums, sudden bursts of synth, and Duffy’s voice artificially rising and falling.

In 2021 they taught a month-long songwriting workshop, creating prompts to help participants find new approaches and forms, and it evidently fed back into their own work. It’s not that these songs aren’t as serious as the older material, just more unpredictable. 

The combinations of instruments and timbres are as unconventional as the words often are - Sugar the Bruise is a particularly evocative name for an EP - and when they do deliver a song that’s noticeably personal and straightforward, there’s enough self-awareness to call it ‘Private Life’.

In addition to embracing the unexpected, Duffy told the Santa Barbara Independent they wanted to “not dredge up everything that was painful over the last year and a half and make songs about it”, and instead write about other things.

The EP ends on a trip to the Berlin museum, with a track called ‘The Bust of Nefertiti’. Duffy describes their conflicted feelings about the beauty of the object and the colonialism that brought it to Germany before it opens up into an extended disco outro. It’s very unexpected, but that’s the point.