JUST when the hiatus between albums was beginning to stretch to Kate Bush proportions, Polly Jean Harvey MBE returns with her first in five years.

Following up 2011's Let England Shake, winner of her second Mercury Prize, was always going to be the tallest of orders, and perhaps inevitably Harvey spread the net after putting Britain under the microscope.

Like Bill Bryson and Jeremy Paxman in their waspish books, this daughter of Dorset had considered what it was to be British/English, now that the Empire had faded but its malign impact still lived on in the wars of this century. Whereas they were journalistic and knowing, Harvey was more poetic and questing and troubled by where she fitted in or didn't.

The Hope Six Demolition Project takes her abroad in a sort of From Our Own Correspondent report, but there is now an exasperation, a glumness and anger too, as she turns her cynicism on capitalism, the United States and the politics of poverty.

This is indeed a demolition project, and such is Harvey's desire to squeeze in so much detail, her freedom of expression runs against the meter in her fraught song structures. Polly doesn't do pretty, and nor could she, given the grave mood here, wherein she uses her reportage from Afghanistan, Kosovo and Washington DC as a lacerating weapon.

Just look at the titles: The Community Of Hope, Ministry Of Defence, Near The Memorials To Vietnam And Lincoln, The Ministry Of Social Affairs; titles to songs as sombre and dour as they sound. Rather than protest songs that stir, or promise reviving hope, they stay at a distance, barking on a chain with their ugly, grim guitars, heavy-hearted saxophone, stormy percussion and gospel singing beyond redemption.

By comparison with Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez, Harvey's apocalyptic exercise in exhorting change is bald and bleak, bold but dry, for all her compassion and swagger.