The cover of PJ Harvey's second album shows her in the shower — a typical setting for a male fantasy, but one that she upends by being depicted mid-hair-flip, creating an arc of wet hair and water that frames her gently grinning face. That upending of traditional tropes of desire was all over her debut, Dry, but it becomes even more in-your-face on Rid of Me, which is littered with body parts and fluids and the emotions brought forth by their deployment. Engineered by Steve Albini in such a way that it brought the essential tensions of Harvey's music — masculine/feminine, beautiful/ugly, ecstatic/unfulfilled — right to the forefront, Rid of Me contains some of the most iconic songs of Harvey's career — the ode to swagger "50ft Queenie," the low-end-plumbing depiction of female frustration "Dry," the take-the-reins cover of Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited." There's also "Yuri-G," a depiction of romantic madness that might be one of the most-overlooked songs in her catalog, despite its garage-borne chorus and fearless troop toward its endpoint.

But it's the differing treatments of the gender-flipping "Man-Size," which are presented as both a straightforward, slow-build rock song and as a piece arranged for strings and… read more »