By Paul Robicheau

Many of PJ Harvey’s fans at MGM came for a challenging ride, and the performer gave it to them with a stunning show.

PJ Harvey at MGM Music Hall at Fenway. Photo: Paul Robicheau

PJ Harvey rarely tours. Her last Boston concert before Wednesday’s stunning show at MGH Music Hall at Fenway came at House of Blues in 2017 — and that was her first in over a decade. Years before the music industry fell prey to the pandemic, she’d already shied from the typical cycle of recording and touring to shift her concentration to poetry. And if Harvey proved noncommercial in her musical projects since the 1990s heyday of her eponymous punk-blues combo, her poetry ambitions took her down a more obscure rabbit hole.

In 2022, after several years of work, Harvey released a book-length narrative poem, Orlam, a semi-autobiographical fantasy tale of a nine-year-old girl marking her last year of childhood innocence amid supernatural beings (including a lamb’s-eye oracle) in England’s West Country. Notably, it taps into the Dorset dialect of the singer’s home county, an odd characteristic carried into latest album I Inside the Old Year Dying, its songs inspired by her epic poem.

PJ Harvey at MGM Music Hall at Fenway. Photo: Paul Robicheau

Many of Harvey’s fans at MGM came for a challenging ride and Harvey gave it to them on Wednesday by performing I Inside the Old Year Dying in its entirety as the first half of her 105-minute show. Harvey — backlit like a goddess in layers of white — and four bandmates, dressed in muted brown and gray colors that blended with a stark backdrop that suggested fossilized fissures, heightened the sparse, subdued tone of the album with their taut, austere live delivery.

The singer nonetheless animated the songs with solemn, graceful movements in a show staged like a play as much as a concert. The opening “Prayer at the Gate” saw Harvey reaching, wrapping and contorting arms around her head, covering her eyes with the backs of finger-splayed hands like the creature (speaking of a lamb’s-eye oracle) from the movie Pan’s Labyrinth. Then she went from co-singing “Autumn Term” erectly side-by-side with longtime collaborator John Parish to sweeping dance twirls around the stage.

Recorded sounds introduced a few songs, from church bells and braying sheep to a dialect-steeped fade into the eerie keyboard and percussion pulse of “The Nether-edge,” where Harvey seamless slid into falsetto for the chorus “Now it looks like almost zounds, wordle zircles wider.” Wordle appeared in other songs, as did references to beech and ash trees and the phrase “Love me tender,” a wink at a Christ-like ghost figure named Wyman-Elvis. It wasn’t the Wordle of today’s puzzle craze, but a translation to “world.” And Harvey certainly created one with this album, which floated such specimens of unusual language as “quartere’il and wormwood” and “vog-a-veiling.”

In addition to singing in motion, grounding herself to different chairs and a pew-like bench at times, Harvey played electric and acoustic guitar while Parish, Giovanni Ferrario, and James Johnston alternated between keyboards, guitars, and bass. Jean-Marc Butty anchored a drum kit with primitive patterns, often using mallets, as he did on marching album closer “A Noiseless Noise,” which Harvey ended by singing “Go home now, love, leave your wandering.”

Harvey left the stage as the band lined up with guitars, an antique field drum, and handclaps to deliver “The Colour of the Earth,” a song about a friend lost in the trenches of war from 2011’s Let England Shake. And that transition to older material continued from the same album when Harvey returned for the strum and shuffle of “The Glorious Land” (“Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet,” with children orphaned and deformed) and “The Words That Maketh Murder.” That tune lent a more upbeat swing with Harvey on autoharp and the closing chorus “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?”

Finally, the singer reached back for what patient fans were hoping for. In a pleading “Send His Love to Me,” she waved a hand and dropped to her knees to slap the stage, then wove a subtle spell with deeper cuts “The Garden” (her undulating body movements more dramatic as her silhouette was projected on the backdrop) and a solo acoustic “The Desperate Kingdom of Love” that left the well-packed MGH hall as silent as West Country woods.

Giovanni Ferrario and PJ Harvey at MGM Music Hall at Fenway. Photo: Paul Robicheau

But the night didn’t turn from precisely choreographed play to edgy rock show until Harvey chorded into early ’90s nuggets “Man-Size” (the singer nailing its high-pitched line “I cast my iron knickers down”) and “Dress,” which picked up intensity with Johnston’s sawed violin stabs and Parish’s barbed guitar break.

Harvey continued to please, returning to 1995’s commercial high-water mark To Bring You My Love to cap the set, dancing with the devil through a brooding “Down by the Water” and the title track, the singer initially sitting to sip from a teacup while Parish unspooled its foreboding riff. “I’ve forsaken heaven,” Harvey sang with rising verve, “to bring you my love!”

The deal sealed, the band encored with that album’s secondary hit “C’mon Billy” and “White Chalk,” which referenced a geological feature of Dorset’s coastal hills while she sang of “playing as a child with you.” Indeed, she did, but with a maturity the artist has since nurtured in her older years of living.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.