PJ Harvey
Piece Hall, Halifax

PJ HARVEY’S latest album, I Inside The Old Year Dying is steeped in her childhood home of Dorset. With lyrics based on her poem cycle Orlam, it conjures a natural world of drisk (mist), biddles (beetles), and gapmouths (nightjars).

The challenge of transferring such dialect-rich, internalised narratives on tour is partly addressed by the soundscape that heralds her appearance. Pigeons coo, children’s laughter ripples on the breeze, and distorted bells clang. They signal the intense, eerie mood that occupies the first half of her 90-minute set.

Playing nine of the album’s 12 tracks, none of which have a conventional structure or hook, is a big ask of an audience that’s already cold and damp.

That she pulls it off is testament to her singular vision: dressed in a deconstructed Quaker-style cream gown, every movement is controlled. She flings her arms across her face, whirls across the stage in slow motion, and sits at a wooden writing desk while keening in an otherworldly high register.

The only thing that’s not controlled during the performance is the emotions. The personas on the latest tracks, such as Prayer At The Gate and Autumn Term, may have some disconnect but once she moves onto older tracks, passion runs deep.

There’s the carnal desert blues of To Bring You My Love, the stomping indie rock of 50ft Queenie, and the gothic drama of The Garden. Yet she’s at her most vulnerable when it’s just her and an acoustic guitar playing the haunting set highlight The Desperate Kingdom of Love to a hushed crowd.

Her four-piece band of multi-instrumentalists nonetheless offer the versatility to enrich her diverse back catalogue. James Johnston brings scraping fiddle to the urgency of Dress, Giovanni Ferrario and long-term collaborator John Parish adds gutsy backing vocals to A Child’s Question, July.

At one point the three, joined by percussionist Jean-Marc Butty, line up at the front of the stage to perform The Colour Of The Earth while Harvey vanishes. Taken from 2011’s Let England Shake, it’s here rendered as a long-forgotten folk song.

She ends the performance, as she begins it, with a ghostly evocation of her home county in White Chalk. One of many songs in the set to feature children — unborn, murdered, fatherless — it has a quiet, unsettling tone as she walks, “on a path cut 1,500 years ago.”

This narrowing of past and present is perfectly complemented by the “absolutely beautiful” venue, a Grade I listed former cloth hall, where you half expect to see ghost merchants being conjured out of the stonework by the stillness of her folkloric tales.