There was a subtle dissonance at the outset of PJ Harvey's Wednesday night show in Toronto; the crowd at History seemed struck by some combination of reverence, held-breath excitement and just a touch of confusion — what exactly were we in for tonight?
Anyone expecting Harvey to come out guitar-swinging was likely disappointed (and, it must be said, a little delusional, if they've been following the past two decades of her career even casually) by the eerie crackle of I Inside the Old Year Dying opener "Prayer at the Gate."
Still, even for an artist as sonically unmoored as Harvey, a shapeshifter in the truest and most restless sense, this was something different. Surrounded by the creaking ephemera of Harvey's Dorset youth — a wooden pew, a writing desk, a shell-like chair, a table laid out with glasses and a branch-stuffed vase — Harvey and her band played through her latest album in full, warping History into a shadowy fairy tale place that bent minutes and hours into foreign shapes.
Against a backdrop that morphed with each new light cast on it — reaching tree limbs one minute, a plain of cracked earth the next, a Petri dish, wood grain and magma — Harvey leaned into her fantastical vignettes with a quiet theatricality, inhabiting small characters that illuminated these ghostly songs with the spark of human warmth. She mimed a banshee's shrieks on the outro of "Autumn Term," she reached out to the sky and into the crowd for "Seem an I," beckoning at her players as she counted up on "All Souls," settling in a chair or swinging slowly across the stage in her stilted reverie.
Eventually, you could feel the room soften into the between-place that Harvey had taken us, as performer and audience met each other halfway — it helped when Harvey finally slung her guitar over her small shoulders. The crowd's instantaneous relief was palpable; here was something familiar and grounding. However, it's that discomfort, that sense of creeping unfamiliarity, that made Harvey's performance so thrilling and nourishing. Never one to rest on her laurels, Harvey presented her art as it lives now, her vision unblurred by the ever-present past.
After the ground-rumbling thunder of I Inside the Old Year Dying closer "A Noiseless Noise" finished reverberating through the air, shaking loose any still-lingering ghosts, the spell was broken. We'd entered a new portion of the evening, one where Harvey's past was allowed to creep under the spotlight, filling the room with a new kind of intensity. The transition kicked off with a rousing performance of Let England Shake closer "The Colour of the Earth," led by Harvey's band — James Johnston, Giovanni Ferrario, Jean-Marc Butty and the legendary John Parish — as Harvey herself slipped backstage to shed her robe.
She returned for a run of classics that included "The Glorious Land," "The Words That Maketh Murder," "Angelene," "Send His Love to Me," "Down by the Water," "Man-Size," "Dress," "The Garden," "To Bring You My Love" and a stirring solo rendition of 2004's "The Desperate Kingdom of Love." Even tackling the more bone-rattling songs in her past catalogue, Harvey embodied a careful stillness, pulling the room's jittery electricity into her quiet centre.
Returning for a brief encore, Harvey once again pulled the rug out from her now-hypnotized crowd. There would be no "Rid of Me," no "Good Fortune," no "Sheela Na Gig" or "Long Snake Moan." Instead, Harvey and her band launched into two songs from 2016's The Hope Six Demolition Project, closing the night on a searching, skin-tingling rendition of "Dollar, Dollar," Parish's disintegrating guitar solo splitting the air into a million tiny pieces. And there was Harvey, watching her bandmate quietly as he took things apart.