PJ HARVEY

The Hope Six Demolition Project (Island/Vagrant Records)

Ever since someone decided that rock ’n’ roll needed to be considered important, conviction has been a cherished asset among serious songwriters. This is how people can still argue that the Dylan of “The Times They Are a Changin’” is better than the 50 subsequent years of Dylan. It’s the main reason anyone still defends pre-irony U2. And it’s why the phrase “change the world” remains the benchmark for assessing the potential of a given artist/album/song.

The latest album by PJ Harvey is unlikely to change the world, which says more about the world than it does about the great artist who made it. (The Hope Six Demolition Project entered with a comparative whimper, as it had the misfortune of being released the same week in which Prince died.)

Even if it had received the full team-of-stallions-marching-down-Broadway-through-a-blizzard-of-ticker-tape treatment that I believe should attend Polly Jean Harvey’s every musical utterance, Hope Six would still be unlikely to have the kind of impact “important” rock music used to be able to expect—or in some cases, to manufacture—because its central theme isn’t a declaration of ideology or a call to arms. Just the opposite. The album is dedicated to the quest to find even one true thing worth saying about a world beset by hellish depravity, war, hunger, and poverty.

Though the songs sound like a continuation of Harvey’s Let England Shake, which, interestingly, read as something of a reconstructed protest album, consumed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But where that 2011 album’s perspective was literary, panoptical, a reflection on the nature of war itself, Hope Six is entirely subjective, a single lens on a shattered world.

Harvey has said the songs arose from her travels to Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington, DC, with the war photographer Seamus Murphy, who also collaborated on visual materials for Let England Shake. And journalism does seem to be the operative mode of the lyrics throughout. Though the language is not without the odd flourish, it's also held within the constraint of a single perspective and all it can and can’t see. (This is where the poetry sneaks in.)

In “The Orange Monkey,” a restlessness in the narrator’s mind tells her that travel is the only way to resolve the questions that plague her. “I took a plane to a foreign land / And said, ‘I’ll write down what I find,” she sings, in a bit of a mission statement.

You won’t be surprised to learn that what she finds isn’t pretty. Mass killings, brutalized native people, murdered children, “a displaced family eating a cold horse’s hoof.”

In “Chain of Keys,” she witnesses a woman walking on a dusty road carrying the 15 keys to the 15 houses standing vacant, presumably because the residents have all been killed. “Imagine what her eyes have seen,” Harvey sings. “We ask, but she won’t let us in.” This is a story about the suggestive power of facts, unencumbered by a songwriter's invasive extraploations.

In the semi-controversial “The Community of Hope,” bedraggled landmarks fly by as if being seen through a car window: “Here’s the old mental institution / Now the Homeland Security Base / And here’s God’s Deliverance Centre / A deli called MLK.”

The incomplete nature of Harvey’s observations has vexed people who think she’s writing like a poverty tourist. Clearly, though, song and album are about the impossibility of fully understanding the lives of people trapped in the kind of environments she’s singing about.

The best illustration comes in the final song, which is named for the words she hears chanted by a boy begging at her closed car window: “I can’t look through or past / A face saying, ‘Dollar dollar’ / A face pockmarked and hollow / Staring from the glass.”

Were “Dollar Dollar” a work of fiction, you might think the car window a bit of a clumsy symbol. Aided by a haunting sample of Murphy’s field recording of beggars chanting the words on the streets of Kabul, the glass becomes a perfect literalization of the transparent divisions—wealth, class, race, gender—that we ignore at our peril (and theirs).

But if the words are blunt, the music is restlessly inventive, even violent at times, and frequently imbued with the sounds of American blues instruments and singing. The gospel traditional “Wade in the Water” wanders into and out of the arresting “River Anacostia.” The baritone sax that murmurs beneath “The Ministry of Defence” returns with unhinged force in “The Ministry of Social Affairs,” blowing in double-tracked lunatic dissonance before resolving into a familiar bebop figure. These sounds are not merely appropriate for depictions of African American displacement, they are essential signals of deference.

And they come together in the album’s best and most rocking song, “The Wheel,” which borrows the language of the Rolling Stones’ guitar (a triangulation of “Gimme Shelter,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”) to evoke a desolate landscape bereft of children.

There’s an argument that when pop stars start talking about poverty, it’s time to change the channel. And it’s true that those who miss the identity swagger of Dry and Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea will no doubt be bummed by it. But I hear no hubris in PJ Harvey’s inquiry. Because it’s an inquiry.

The motor of The Hope Six Demolition Project doesn’t seem to be the urge to change the world. Rather, it sounds like the work of a powerful artist who has seen that the world is other than she’d assumed, and now refuses to look away.