Pitchfork I Inside the Old Year Dying PJ Harvey 乐评 & 翻译

In songs adapted from her book-length poem Orlam, the British singer-songwriter crafts a hallucinatory dreamworld out of folk instruments, primitive electronics, and warped field recordings.

在改编自她的长篇诗歌《Orlam》的专辑中，这位英国创作型歌手用民间乐器、原始电子产品和扭曲的现场录音制作了一个幻觉般的梦幻世界。

PJ Harvey has dedicated the second half of her career to finding new ways to sound unlike herself. Since her 2007 reboot, White Chalk, Harvey has retired the seething yowl that was once her signature, replacing it with whatever high trills, strained cries, and utterly unlikely expressions she can squeeze from her upper register. During the recording sessions for I Inside the Old Year Dying, her first album in seven years, she committed to stretching her voice even further beyond its apparent limits, employing longtime collaborators John Parish and Flood to overrule her any time she sang in what she now calls “my PJ Harvey voice.”

PJ Harvey在她职业生涯的后半段致力于寻找让自己听起来与众不同的新方法。自2007年重启《White Chalk》以来，Harvey已经放弃了曾经是她标志性的沸腾的咆哮，取而代之的是她能从高音区挤出的任何高音颤音、紧张的哭声和完全不可能的表情。在她七年来的第一张专辑《I Inside the Old Year Dying》的录制过程中，她承诺将自己的声音进一步扩展到明显的极限之外，聘请长期合作者John Parish和Flood在她用她现在所说的“我的PJ Harvey声音”演唱时否决她。

That sounds like a miserable way to work, with your co-creators acting as a kind of bark collar, correcting you for defaulting to the notes that come most naturally from your throat. But constraint has a way of breeding creativity, and there’s no denying the indelible, almost dissociative quality that Harvey’s left-field vocal choices have given her recent albums, most memorably her 2011 autoharp-freaked antiwar masterpiece Let England Shake. The effect is like witnessing an out-of-body experience—a worshipper speaking in tongues, perhaps, or a method actor losing themselves a little too deeply in character. Her displaced voices create a sense of transportation, discovery, and, fairly often, panic.

这听起来像是一种痛苦的工作方式，你的共同创作者扮演着一种树皮项圈的角色，纠正你对喉咙里最自然的音符的默认。但约束有一种培养创造力的方式，不可否认，哈维的左外野声乐选择给她最近的专辑带来了不可磨灭的、几乎游离的品质，最令人难忘的是她2011年的反战杰作《Let England Shake》。这种效果就像目睹了一次灵魂出窍的经历——一个可能会说方言的崇拜者，或者一个有点过于沉浸在性格中的方法演员。她流离失所的声音营造出一种运输感、发现感，而且常常会产生恐慌。

With I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey has again crafted something with no precedent in her discography: a hallucinatory dreamworld woven from non-traditional folk instruments, primitive electronics, and field recordings warped and distorted beyond recognition. She adapted these 12 songs from her 2022 book Orlam, an epic narrative poem that she spent the better part of a decade completing, in part because it required mastering the nearly forgotten dialect of Dorset, the English county where she was raised. Her verses depict an upbringing presumably something like her own but heightened by fantasy, juxtaposing the mundanities and seasonal rhythms of rural youth—school days, farm work, sexual awakenings—against a blend of horror and magical realism.

凭借《I Inside the Old Year Dying》，哈维再次在她的唱片创作中创造了一个前所未有的东西：一个由非传统民间乐器、原始电子产品和扭曲扭曲得面目全非的现场录音编织而成的幻觉梦幻世界。她将这12首歌改编自2022年出版的《Orlam》一书，这是一首史诗般的叙事诗，她花了十年的大部分时间完成了这首诗，部分原因是这首诗需要掌握她长大的英国多塞特郡几乎被遗忘的方言。她的诗句描绘了一种可能与她自己相似但又因幻想而变得更加强烈的成长过程，将乡村青年上学、农活、性觉醒的世俗和季节节奏与恐怖和魔幻现实主义的混合并置。

A spiritual realm tugs at the boundaries of Harvey’s imagining of Dorset, with a cast that includes a supernatural oracle in the form of a dead lamb’s eye and a Christ-like figure named Wyman-Elvis and modeled after The King himself. (In addition to lyrics about peanut butter and banana sandwiches and Memphis, “Love Me Tender” repeats as a refrain throughout the album, sung as both serenade and scripture.) Allusions to Shakespeare, John Keats, and Joan of Arc lend additional comp-lit intrigue to her lyrics, though it’s unclear whether they’re keys to unlocking the album’s puzzle or merely Easter eggs.

一个精神领域突破了Harvey对多塞特郡的想象，演员阵容包括一个死羊眼形式的超自然神谕和一个以国王本人为原型、名叫怀曼·埃尔维斯的基督般的人物。（除了关于花生酱、香蕉三明治和孟菲斯的歌词外，《Love Me Tender》在整张专辑中作为副歌重复出现，以小夜曲和经文的形式演唱。）莎士比亚、约翰·济慈和圣女贞德的典故为她的歌词增添了更多的竞争阴谋，尽管尚不清楚它们是解开专辑谜题的钥匙，还是仅仅是复活节彩蛋。

The mythology of I Inside the Old Year Dying is inscrutable even by Harvey’s standards, a nonlinear story told in a language you can’t fully understand. Dorset’s archaic dialect includes words like mampus, inneath, scrid, gawly, charken, and chammer, and even with the glossary that Harvey has included to help decode them, her sentences still read like a cryptogram that’s been solved incorrectly. “I laugh in the leaves and merge to meesh/Just a charm in the woak with the chalky children of evermore,” she sings on the boisterous “I Inside the Old I Dying.” The title track, on the other hand, is hushed and vaporous, trading the other song’s stomp for the raw, lips-to-mic intimacy of ’60s folk records.

即使以Harvey的标准来看，《I Inside the Old Year Dying》的神话也是难以理解的，这是一个用你无法完全理解的语言讲述的非线性故事。多塞特郡的古老方言包括mampus、inneath、scrid、gawly、charken和chammer等单词，即使有Harvey为帮助解码这些单词而提供的词汇表，她的句子读起来仍然像一个被错误破解的密码。她在喧闹的《I Inside the Old I Dying》中唱道：“I laugh in the leaves and merge to meesh/Just a charm in the woak with the chalky children of evermore。”另一方面，主打歌是安静而虚幻的，用另一首歌的踩踏换成了60年代民间唱片中原始的、嘴唇到麦克风的亲密感。

In an early imagining, the album was conceived as a theater piece, and Harvey brings a stage director’s sense of sound design to Dying, unsettling her compositions with manipulated and distorted field recordings that create a sense of uncanny nature. Ultimately, the record’s greatest gambit isn’t any individual bold choice but the decision to stack so many on top of each other: the disquieting production, the odd instrumentation, the ancient tongue, the daffy vocals. Her falsetto on “Autumn Term” is so cracked and fragile it’s almost farcical, like something out of a Bob’s Burgers credits sequence. When she pinches her vocals on “Lwonesome Tonight” she sounds like a Punch and Judy puppet’s Neil Young impression.

在早期的想象中，这张专辑被认为是一部戏剧作品，Harvey 将舞台导演的声音设计感带到了《Dying》中，用被操纵和扭曲的现场录音扰乱了她的作品，创造了一种神秘的自然感。最终，这张唱片最大的策略不是任何个人的大胆选择，而是决定将这么多东西叠在一起：令人不安的制作、奇怪的乐器、古老的舌头、愚蠢的人声。她在《Autumn Term》中的假声是如此的破碎和脆弱，几乎是一场闹剧，就像鲍勃的汉堡系列中的一些东西。当她在“Lwonesome Tonight”中紧缩嗓音时，她的声音听起来像是潘趣和朱迪木偶Neil Young的印象。

On another record, those vocals might scan as whimsy. Here they become one more element left disquietingly out of place. Dying’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.

在另一张唱片上，这些人声可能会显得异想天开。在这里，它们又成了一个令人不安的元素。Dying有力的怪异可能是以牺牲曾经是Harvey强项的即时性为代价的，但PJ Harvey的专辑现在就是这样运作的：你感觉到了，却无法解释。她早期的唱片打击了她的心灵，而现在她却玩弄于心。