School bells ring and a spotlight falls on an empty mic stand. Polly Jean Harvey stands in the darkness, waiting for the applause to dim before stepping into that beam of light.
Prayer at the Gate, the opening song on Harvey’s 10th album I Inside the Old Year Dying, sets the muddy, macabre tone. Over whistling synths and Jean-Marc Butty’s elegant drumming, like dragging feet, she makes her great voice eerily thin, as if she’s channelling a message. “Look behind, look before,” she decrees, eyes fixed on the middle-distance. “Life knocking at death’s door.”
