Because this is really the life. Because this is the lively tune, the one my friends break into on their guitar around a barbecue on summer nights. Because these are the unlikely yet harmonious notes, the ones we sing bursting out laughing when curled up on a couch. Because these are the coloured drinks, the ones we have again and again during our joyful evenings. Because this is the husky vocal, the one we listen to with our eyes closed. Because this is John Bonham’s electrifying drums, the one we admire stunned on Led Zep’s last live record when it’s 6 a.m. and there’s nothing else to do than falling asleep in front of a DVD. Because Amy Macdonald offers us with This Is The Life the most moving and genuine album of this year, of my writer career, of this decade maybe.

Listening to it makes us sway, makes us teeter. Lynn Teeter Flower isn’t only Maria Taylor’s friend’s nickname, it’s also the name she chose for her second solo album, released in 2007 – after 11:11 in 2005 - on the label Saddle Creek. Label that the pretty brunette shares with Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst) – to whom I feel obliged to take my hat off, Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh being one of the most beautiful songs ever. On top of the label, she also shares a lot of her work with Conor, and he put his touch on this new album with great pleasure.

Let’s batten up the hatches for once and dive into New Jersey. The wonderful state Jenny Owen Youngs comes from, bringing her sweet Batten The Hatches with her. A first record, self-released in 2005, before the young woman gets noticed by the well-known-around-here label Nettwerk. It’s Fuck Was I, future first single, with its appearance in the TV show Weeds that allowed the singer to re-release the album, plus one song, on the Canadian label in 2007.

Reproductions that sound like originals. Because even if we know the previous versions by heart, these ones delight our ears like at first time. Charlotte Martin had a go at the perilous exercise covers can be with her last album Reproductions, released in 2007. And the young woman did really well. She managed the amazing feat of covering songs from artists that are way established in our musical culture, without renouncing them or her very own artistic identity.

Real seeds of sun in the ears, that’s the present Hayley Sales gives us with Sunseed. A first album, charming yet impressive of maturity for a woman this age. Twenty years old and little Hayley is already big.

Won’t get erased like chalk: White Chalk, PJ Harvey’s last album is unclassifiable among her discography.

Outstanding. Beyond categories even. Yet, it’s her, there isn’t a doubt about it. She is so present in this record, as much as in all the others, but it’s her maturity, as a woman, as an artist that is more asserted than in any other. The guitar is gone, replaced by a clumsy yet heartrending piano, all over which the singer’s fingers go with the same fierceness mixed with smoothness they used to apply to the strings. Polly Jean grew up, her universe too, so much that it’s not exactly a part of ours anymore. It’s from another dimension that she brings those harrowing songs, this high-pitched voice, these grazed lyrics that move us to an indescribable point, this timeless lyricism that lies in each and every track of the album. Even on the jacket, the young woman seems to be coming from another time, a time which wouldn’t exactly exist, a time that would be lost in the shelves of a library, between Jane Eyre and Bram Stoker. And this young woman whose dress might have belonged to the Brönte sisters brings gripping songs from this indefinable time. Like To Talk To You where she easily talks to her grand-mother, already gone to the beyond ‘under the earth wish I was with you’ ; Before Departure where she invites a whole bunch of talented musicians as steeped in this spectral universe as she is, and to whom the lyrics seem to wink ‘friends that last will dance one more time with me’ ; or also Dear Darkness that takes us a little more in the gloom of this magnificent disc ‘dear darkness now it’s your time to look after us’. These lyrics she defends aren’t autobiographical confirm everything the music was already saying: the new dimension personified by Harvey is dark but never dismal, deep but never heavy, high-pitched but never sharp, wonderful of ageless torments. PJ tells us about her new perception of things, as in The Devil, the beautiful opening song ‘what formly cheered me now seems insignificant’ ; she tells us about her will to change, towards a height that can’t be measured in Grow Grow Grow ‘teach me how to grow’ ; she tells us about what really matters in When Under Ether ‘when under ether the mind comes alive but conscious of nothing but the will to survive’ ; she tells us about the everlasting, what was, is, will be, in White Chalk, the title song ‘on a path cut fifteen hundred years ago’ ; she tells us about what makes our lives hollow in Broken Harp ‘please don’t reproach me for, for how empty my life has become’ ; she tells us through those powerful lyrics about the woman she’s becoming, Silence is a song that says a lot ‘I’d risen this morning determined to break spare my longing, not to think’ ; she finally tells us about that second birth, that bend she’s going through and that gorgeous album illustrates, in The Mountain ‘high above the mountain an eagle calling down to the soldier who falters the soldier on the ground. But, to my ears, The Piano is the true master of piece, as a proof of the major part the instrument played in the witchcraft of this universe set into place by a PJ Harvey who keeps surprising us endlessly ‘nobody’s listening nobody’s listening’. We are listening, and she always enchants us with her music.

She confides us (in the Inrockuptibles): ‘The doors of my imaginary world seem wide open: I go wherever I want, nothing withholds me.’ And we can only be delighted.

Thank you Polly Jean, for this new delicious and upsetting album which I’m not even close to let go.