Orlam

I'm tempted to go the full 5, partly because it's so good in its own right, partly because this is a side of PJH we've only glimpsed before, especially on albums like White Chalk and Dance Hall at Louse Point; the writer who draws a line from goth to actual old things, who can capture the inner life of a girl in a world where - thanks in no small part to the dialect which I'm told is broad - it's the 1970s and the 1600s and the 600s all at once, where time moves like the growth of an oak or ash tree; glacially slow, but ever-shifting. A PJ Harvey who owes as much to CS Lewis and Fairport Convention as to Howlin' Wolf and Pixies.

To some extent, I'm a little bothered by the bilinguality of the book; I understand the wish to write in pure dialect, but other authors have done that without having to spell it out in RP and footnotes and glossary, and it feels a tiny bit hand-holdy. At the same time, there's something to the way she occasionally needs to change the story just a tiny bit to say the same in English that Ira can think so easily in Dorzet - the rhymes need to change, the animals and plants need to lose some of their magic. It's part of the dying of childhood.

Once or twice I'm reminded of her old beau's And the Ass Saw the Angel; the heavy dialect, the brutality of adolescence, the ensouling of the world; but this is a far more mature, controlled work, without ever losing the perspective of the child telling it.

I'm really looking forward to new music from her now.