I love PJ Harvey.

Still, I’m understandably hesitant when my rock favorites get literary and publish book-length poems in an outdated regional dialect. Harvey’s latest album, I die in the old yearis an offshoot of her verse epic, Orlamwritten in the extinct vernacular of her native Dorsetshire. It’s a fascinating curiosity that I haven’t quite been intrigued or curious enough to decipher.

After seeing the album come to life on stage at St. Paul’s Palace Theater on Wednesday night, filled with Harvey’s confident charisma, his story told through movement as much as words and music, I find myself more drawn to it , to interpret the album (and the poem) as always. And yet I also have the feeling that I have experienced the work in its final form.

I have seen Harvey five times before and each performance was unforgettable. In 1993, she appeared at the Academy in New York (with the “Creep”-era Radiohead opening) fronting a metrically distorted but muscular trio, her guitar cutting up the blues with idiosyncratic precision. Two years later, she returned in a flaming red dress, her image freshly revamped and enhanced, on the To Bring You My Love Tour at the Moore Theater in Seattle. In 1998, she lost herself in stories of romantic desperation on First Ave Is that desire? After the release of “Fine Line” it was a huge success in 2000 Stories from the city, stories from the seaand she stood alone on the stage at Madison Square Garden in 2001 with her guitar, seemingly unconcerned about whether or not the U2 fans waiting for her to finish responded to her songs.

Harvey hasn’t been to Minnesota since 2009, when she played at the zoo. (I missed that show.) In the meantime, she reinvented herself vocally, looking for ways to sound she didn’t know before. She excavated the remains of the First World War Let England shake and made some confused proclamations about poverty from a moralizing distance The Hope Six demolition project. But I couldn’t hear it I die in the old year as the culmination of these jumps and failures until I saw (and I mean seennot just heard), she played the new album in its entirety in the first half of her set last night. Like every great show I’d seen her before, it was unlike any other and yet unmistakably the work of the same woman.

I die in the old year is the story (or so I was told) of a nine-year-old girl named Ira-Abel who has supernatural visions and encounters an otherworldly Elvis figure. But these details only mattered to the extent that they mattered to Harvey. Seeing these songs on stage was like watching a play whose libretto existed entirely in the star’s head, a performance that was self-contained but never seemed obscurantist. It was an exercise in dedicated artistic discipline, but also a gratuitous display of aura, a feat only accomplished by someone whose very presence inspires gratitude in others.

Harvey was slim and, at 54, deceptively fragile as ever. He wore a brown dress covered with a sort of riding cloak patterned with bare branches. Earth tones dominated – the stage backdrop was a picture of peeling paint, or perhaps vines spreading along a house wall, or even cracked, dry earth. Harvey often soared in a gentle but harsh soprano that was foreign to her early career, sometimes even rising to a haunting falsetto, occasionally dropping into her more familiar conversational midrange, hinting at a new personality with each sliding vocal change.

The music was sui generis folk-rock, recognizably British and rural even though it came from no discernible tradition, never lacking in melody, electronically amplified and interspersed with field recordings. (As Harvey told Ann Powers last year, the people she worked with were shockingly skilled: “I could be so specific and say to someone, ‘Can you find me a November wind blowing through barbed wire at dawn?’ And “I have about three different options for me.”) She was accompanied by four old guys who knew their stuff, including long-time collaborator John Parish, and sometimes she played guitar herself.

Read along with lyrics like “Drush Repeats ‘enself/Over Underwhelem/Croopied in the Reames/Shepherd Gurrel Weaves,” as I did again this morning, and you’ll find yourself in the company of a woman who’s been taken by the wrong friends of the Fascinated by language. through the ability of words to lead you into a labyrinth of meaning rather than vividly describing a way out. Live, these words were simplified into sounds, the blunt Saxon consonants in “I laugh in the leaves and merge into meesh/Just a charm in the woak with the chalky children of evermore” sharpened stones or smooth moss, the vowels slowing down the original Moans related in their discrete forms.

The verbal moments that emerged in the palace were clear and intimidating: “Are you Elvis? Are you God? Jesus sent to gain my trust?” What other singer could get away with that? But what not only makes up for, but also hurts, Harvey’s artistic moments is that they never reek of nonsense – they just exude the musk of fine Dorsetshire horse dung and earthy clay. The moods it evoked were frightening, as childhood is, with those panicky gaps in knowledge that adults mistake for innocence. There was nothing petty or merely mystical going on.

This was as much a dance performance as a rock show, where Harvey’s movements were controlled but never seemed overly rehearsed. Her arms guided her body; Her hands guided her arms. She slunk, weaved, slinked, and threw her limbs forward like Elsa Lancaster The Bride of Frankensteinbut above all, she never seemed to strive for an impact. If she had been supposed to communicate something, to express something, with these movements, they would have been pure child’s play.

The more distance Harvey creates, the more she attracts you – that’s how star power works, after all. This is a woman who can stare at you without seeing you, as if she were looking through you, or who can sit and listen to the recorded voice of Ben Wishaw as Elvis as if she were engaged in a private reverie. She began singing the album’s closing track, “A Noiseless Noise,” a cappella, but it became more and more driving and noisy, as if it were something tangible and something that couldn’t be put into words. Harvey finished the song with his back to us.

With I die in the old year ready, it was oldies time. The second half of the set covered eight of Harvey’s ten albums as well as one of her two full-length collaborations with Parish. Strangely, it belittled their most direct and affirming album, Stories from the city, stories from the seaand avoided even her most submissive, White chalk –Make of it what you will. She can revisit those moments from the past and revive her former self.

As the artist herself stepped off stage for a while (no costume change here, although she did lose the cape for the second act), the four men in her band moved front and center to perform “The Color of the Earth.” Farewell to old comrades that closes Let England shake. And they were, like them, dressed in the color of the earth, all dressed in beige like workers, with the exception of the drummer Jean-Marc Butty, who wore what my friend Andy called “a pagan utility dress.”

Harvey returned to hear more tracks from this album, starting with “The Glorious Land” (“their fruit is deformed children”). She strummed an autoharp for “The Words That Maketh Murder,” sung from the perspective of a man who has seen “soldiers fall like lumps of flesh”; In the final refrain, “What if I took my problem to the United Nations?”, the comical lament of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” morphed into a hollow plea that human authority can override barbarism, and that is all too bleakly current.

Still, the question remained whether Harvey could rock like he used to. Her answer was “50 Ft Queenie” which, quite honestly, made me lose my mind. The way Harvey, early in her career, mangled gender markers and mimicked male boasts and threats, as if torn between co-optation or ridicule, takes on new form in our non-binary age.

On two other songs from this period, “Man-Size” and “Dress,” which featured James Johnston brutally sawing on the violin, neurotic time shifts turned inward, bubbling and exploding, never quite finding release. Dramatic restraint is another of Harvey’s gifts, which he applies to the aching “Black Hearted Love,” the cryptic “The Garden,” and the beautiful solo guitar ballad “The Desperate Kingdom of Love.”

As with the new material, the way Harvey transitioned into these songs was as crucial as the way she sang them or her guitar work. At the end of the macabre fairy tale “Down By the Water,” which she accentuated by clicking two rhythm sticks, she extended an arm just as the stage went black. At the beginning of “To Bring You My Love,” Parish held the first note of the riff for just a second or two longer so you could see the guitar tone before the melody. As always, Harvey sang it as a tantalizing threat, striding forward at the end with his arms outstretched and palms up, as if he were carrying a small body.

Harvey’s encore was a highlight: two songs out The Hope Six demolition project. “The Community of Hope” may strum bluntly as if she always dreamed of writing a Housemartins song, but whatever Lord prays or curses her didn’t make her join us mere mortals to talk about Walmarts sing, and “Dollar Dollar” is prettier than a song about guilt should be. Harvey is at her best when she’s not striving to be understood, but I think it was polite of her to prove her fallibility before leaving the stage.

Anyway, I finally said it Orlam is in stock at the library this morning.

Setlist

Prayer at the gate
Fall semester
Lwonesome Tonight
Seems to be a me
The Netherrim
I die in the old year
All souls
A child’s question, August
I’m old, I’m dying
August
A child’s question, July
A silent sound
The color of the earth
The glorious land
The words that cause murder
50 foot Queenie
Black hearted love
The garden
The desperate kingdom of love
Men’s size
Dress
Down by the water
To bring you my love

Encore
The community of hope
Dollars, dollars