A so-called difficult album with moments of near-transcendence

Nirvana’s third album was burdened with expectations almost as soon as it was even an idea; the success of Nevermind, their 1991 breakthrough, thrust them under a high-performance microscope, onto the gossip pages, and into the rumor mill. Stories that In Utero, recorded by noise king Steve Albini, did not please the band’s label (because it was uncommercial) abounded in the months leading up to its release; Kurt Cobain told SPIN he felt like he was “stuck in a void” because of its tormented birthing process.

“Teenage angst has paid off well; now I’m bored and old,” Cobain drawls as the record opens; he had turned 26 during the album’s recording sessions. This slyly-expressed weariness defines much of In Utero; Cobain’s screeched “Get awayyy!” as Dave Grohl bashes behind him on the grimacing “Scentless Apprentice” could have been directed at any number of people lusting after his newfound fame, while the defiantly downcast “Rape Me” is a wide-eyed challenge for people to do their worst to one another, from the repurposed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff on down.

What much of the chatter about In Utero‘s rawness misses, though, is the moments of intricate beauty hidden underneath the self-loathing and yowled lyrics. The low-in-the-mix harmonies on the chorus of “Pennyroyal Tea” undercut Cobain’s clenched vocalizing of the title’s abortion-inducer; the album’s closer, “All Apologies,” has a haunting cello counterpoint (played by Kera Schaley) that gets increasingly frenetic as the song sways toward its resigned conclusion. “All in all is all we are,” Cobain groans to close out the track, one of his band’s most lasting radio hits. In Utero‘s reputation as Nirvana’s “difficult” album is undercut by moments like these, when Cobain’s pain and his bandmates’ musicianship create moments of near-transcendence.

A world-weary fifth effort that's more than a scene-setter for dark times

Hangovers happen. The Arctic Monkeys — the brash British band led by the acid-voiced, silver-tongued Alex Turner — know this all too well. Their inaugural single hinged on a dancefloor fantasy; the lead single from their last album was hatched at a bar. The title of their fifth album, AM, could be seen as an attempt to get back to basics by going the acronymic route; but the bleary-eyed, moving-through-swamp feel makes it seem like a direction to play the album in the morning, preferably while you’re trying to figure out the coming hours through the headachy haze of what happened the night before.

The world-weariness of AM is akin to that possessed by other great rock records of 2013 (Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails). The woozy “No. 1 Party Anthem” pokes fun at the YOLO mentality, Turner delivering the titular phrase with ennui so deliberate as to make the curl of his sneer audible. “R U Mine?” is a stormy barnburner, its chugging guitars and ghostly backing vocals making Turner’s expressed desire to transcend the dissatisfaction offered by one-night stands all the more urgent. And the callbacks to “War Pigs” that offset the rapid-fire love poetry of “Arabella” serve as an explicit reminder that love can be a battlefield.

AM is not just a scene-setter for darker times, though. Turner’s lyrics are full of longing and wit, a combination made even more potent by his chainsaw of a voice; the band’s devotion to minor keys only increases the potency of the oohs and ahs that periodically descend from the heavens. Those moments of clarity provide a riposte to any “is that all there is” ennui; the answer is clearly no, if only because of the great music that results from bleakly honest surveillance of these depraved times.

Yet despite this lessening of big-tent influence, R&B had a particularly strong year creatively. Perhaps the rush of records came from artists’ acceptance that a pop crossover was not only difficult and distant, it was maybe not even desired. The result was records that felt freer to experiment and dig in aesthetically. Miguel’s second album, Kaleidoscope Dream, is by far the best example: It pushes the genre’s aesthetic boundaries as far as they can go while being mindful of the fact that the music is still also known as “soul.” The singer’s 2010 debut, All I Want Is You, was a slow burner, with woozy love songs like the title track and “Sure Thing” eventually gaining a place on R&B radio. On Dream, Miguel shot higher, melting together funk, rock, pop, soul, hyper-personal lyrics and even a little bit of Jason Mraz-style acoustic goofiness (listen to “Do You” and Mraz’s unkillable “I’m Yours” back-to-back) in a way that was as idiosyncratic as it was thrilling; “Adorn” used Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” and Gregory Abbott’s “Shake You Down” as a springboard for a 21st-century plea for love, while the hollowed-out, glassy-eyed “The Thrill” summed up the dark side of the YOLO philosophy with a swaggering guitar riff and an ominously encroaching backing choir.

Along with Frank Ocean, whose similarly intimate and unified Channel ORANGE came out this year, Miguel received overwhelming amount of critical adulation. The two of them virtually own the Grammys: Ocean received six nominations, Miguel five. But they were far from the only R&B artists successfully playing with genre boundaries. Elle Varner’s Perfectly Imperfect, was a confident, intricately-crafted debut that allowed Varner’s bubbly personality ample space to effervesce into moments of sheer bliss. The love-intoxicated “Refill” winds itself around a hoedown-ready fiddle line; the saucy “Sound Proof Room” is a sexually confident promise of mutual pleasure; she even goes into coffeehouse mode on “Damn Good Friends,” where she uses an acoustic-guitar bed to plead her case to a pal for whom she has romantic feelings. Former Diddy-Dirty Money singer Dawn Richard continued the forward-thinking legacy of that group on her Armor On and White Out EPs, which wrapped futuristic (and, as on the pounding-yet-sweet “Miles,” retro-futuristic) trappings in her tender voice. And Canadian singer-songwriter Melanie Fiona’s The MF Life placed retrofied tracks like the back-patting Motown pastiche “Watch Me Work” and string-aided “Wrong Side of a Love Song” side-by-side with the moody, narcotic “4 AM.” Working in the shade of larger artists, these records nonetheless worked with pop-R&B materials to produce hyper-personal, uniquely stamped projects.

For all the slippery, boundary-striking music being made, there were still plenty of artists who paid homage to the endlessly-renewable resource of the genre’s past. Luke James’s octave-leaping “I Want You” updated the love-song-as-gospel template, the singer’s falsetto reaching Maxwellian heights as he joyously proclaimed his devotion. Anita Baker released her first single in seven years, “Lately,” in the spring; the song picks up almost exactly where her earlier hits like “Sweet Love” and “Giving You the Best That I Got” left off. And then there was R. Kelly’s Write Me Back, the sequel to his 2010 throwback album Love Letter; this time, the Pied Piper updated his touchstones slightly, channeling Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and the greats of ’70s Philadelphia soul. Kelly also garnered headlines with new chapters of his Trapped in the Closet saga, the twisty hip-hopera that had been dormant for five years. Not only did the plot developments multiply like soap bubbles, Kelly engaged in a little bit of retroism of his own, using Trapped‘s signature melody as a jumping-off point for homages to Michael Jackson and ’70s blaxploitation music.

Such homages could be seen as callbacks to an era when flipping the dial could result in a surprise bounty of soul; in contrast, 2012 was when longtime New York radio rivals Kiss-FM and WBLS merged into a single station in order to make room for an outlet of ESPN Radio. But this narrowing of the radio market didn’t stop artists from releasing trial-balloon singles. James parlayed his chart success (and soaring voice) into an opening slot for Beyoncé during her comeback stint in Atlantic City. Ciara, whose last album came out in 2010, released a smattering of singles that culminated in the sprawling “Sorry.”

One R&B artist who remained a mainstay on Top 40 radio (despite taking a hit in album sales) was Ne-Yo, who supplied vocal assists for the likes of Pitbull and Calvin Harris; his clean tenor helped ubiquitous tracks like “Give Me Everything” slice through top-40 radio’s clutter of big beats. But Ne-Yo’s real strength has always been his plainspoken, sturdy, and utterly hummable songwriting. R.E.D. represents his Solomonic attempt to split the difference; during interviews leading up to the album’s release, he was frank about wanting to please all his fanbases with the album. (“If there’s six R&B records [on the album], then there’s six pop records so that everybody can come to the same damn concert and stay for the whole damn show,” he told Angie Martinez of the New York radio station Hot 97.)

The flip side of the airy “Let Me Love You” is the regret-soaked “Should Be You,” a brooding Quiet Storm track that reunites him with his frequent foil Fabolous; there’s even a country crossover attempt, the feather-light, Tim McGraw-assisted “She Is.” The end result is almost the polar opposite of Kaleidoscope Dream — Ne-Yo sees the fracturing of the landscape ahead, and his dancing-all-over-the-map record is his own, nimble response. While R&B as a genre had the ground shifting underneath it in one way or another, the best records embraced the exhilaration that comes from uncertainty.

A so-called difficult album with moments of near-transcendence

Nirvana’s third album was burdened with expectations almost as soon as it was even an idea; the success of Nevermind, their 1991 breakthrough, thrust them under a high-performance microscope, onto the gossip pages, and into the rumor mill. Stories that In Utero, recorded by noise king Steve Albini, did not please the band’s label (because it was uncommercial) abounded in the months leading up to its release; Kurt Cobain told SPIN he felt like he was “stuck in a void” because of its tormented birthing process.

“Teenage angst has paid off well; now I’m bored and old,” Cobain drawls as the record opens; he had turned 26 during the album’s recording sessions. This slyly-expressed weariness defines much of In Utero; Cobain’s screeched “Get awayyy!” as Dave Grohl bashes behind him on the grimacing “Scentless Apprentice” could have been directed at any number of people lusting after his newfound fame, while the defiantly downcast “Rape Me” is a wide-eyed challenge for people to do their worst to one another, from the repurposed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff on down.

What much of the chatter about In Utero‘s rawness misses, though, is the moments of intricate beauty hidden underneath the self-loathing and yowled lyrics. The low-in-the-mix harmonies on the chorus of “Pennyroyal Tea” undercut Cobain’s clenched vocalizing of the title’s abortion-inducer; the album’s closer, “All Apologies,” has a haunting cello counterpoint (played by Kera Schaley) that gets increasingly frenetic as the song sways toward its resigned conclusion. “All in all is all we are,” Cobain groans to close out the track, one of his band’s most lasting radio hits. In Utero‘s reputation as Nirvana’s “difficult” album is undercut by moments like these, when Cobain’s pain and his bandmates’ musicianship create moments of near-transcendence.

Taking inspiration from all over the pop map

It’s been nine years since Kelly Clarkson was crowned as the inaugural American Idol, and in that time she’s remained the show’s ideal; she’s a technically gifted singer with charm to spare, an inviting smile, and a knack for inhabiting hooks like they’re barnhouse lofts squirreled away on Texas farm. Even the most Idol-allergic music consumers have embraced the combination of melody, perfectly calibrated guitar grit, and wailing that made up her 2004 hit “Since U Been Gone”; other songs in her catalog, like the sassy “Walk Away” and the girl-group throwback “I Want You,” are similarly indelible.

In keeping with Clarkson’s career — and the ethos of Idol — her fifth album takes its inspirations from all over the pop map. While Dr. Luke and Max Martin, who shepherded “Gone” and the lead single from Clarkson’s previous album All I Ever Wanted, aren’t present, the producers in the mix give Stronger a texture that shows how the genre of “pop” can be a jumping-off point, and not an endgame. “You Love Me” is muscular guitar-pop with gorgeous new-wave flourishes blossoming on its pre-chorus; “Dark Side” has a delicate lullaby threaded throughout; “Honestly” opens with a floating haze of guitar distortion that could be mistaken for a chillwave track. The through line between all these stylistic leaps is Clarkson’s voice, a formidable instrument that knows when to get vulnerable and when to absolutely blow. (Chillwavers could probably stand to learn a lesson or two from her.)

What gives Stronger its extra oomph is the confidence exhibited by Clarkson as she sings lyrics about self-acceptance being a key to love (“Dark Side”) and rumor mills that she wishes would stop churning (“You Can’t Win”). Escaping the Idol machine has been a great thing for Clarkson, who sometimes takes on the role of the pop world’s ombudsman when she’s defending her former show against the “authenticity” police or rolling her eyes at former Idol meanie Simon Cowell’s declarations that she’s not interested in being a pop star. That Stronger allows her to drop the façade that other pop stars might depend on for dear life, and address both the characters in her songs and her audience directly, speaks both to Clarkson’s charm and to her growing maturity as an artist.

Taking inspiration from all over the pop map

It’s been nine years since Kelly Clarkson was crowned as the inaugural American Idol, and in that time she’s remained the show’s ideal; she’s a technically gifted singer with charm to spare, an inviting smile, and a knack for inhabiting hooks like they’re barnhouse lofts squirreled away on Texas farm. Even the most Idol-allergic music consumers have embraced the combination of melody, perfectly calibrated guitar grit, and wailing that made up her 2004 hit “Since U Been Gone”; other songs in her catalog, like the sassy “Walk Away” and the girl-group throwback “I Want You,” are similarly indelible.

In keeping with Clarkson’s career — and the ethos of Idol — her fifth album takes its inspirations from all over the pop map. While Dr. Luke and Max Martin, who shepherded “Gone” and the lead single from Clarkson’s previous album All I Ever Wanted, aren’t present, the producers in the mix give Stronger a texture that shows how the genre of “pop” can be a jumping-off point, and not an endgame. “You Love Me” is muscular guitar-pop with gorgeous new-wave flourishes blossoming on its pre-chorus; “Dark Side” has a delicate lullaby threaded throughout; “Honestly” opens with a floating haze of guitar distortion that could be mistaken for a chillwave track. The through line between all these stylistic leaps is Clarkson’s voice, a formidable instrument that knows when to get vulnerable and when to absolutely blow. (Chillwavers could probably stand to learn a lesson or two from her.)

What gives Stronger its extra oomph is the confidence exhibited by Clarkson as she sings lyrics about self-acceptance being a key to love (“Dark Side”) and rumor mills that she wishes would stop churning (“You Can’t Win”). Escaping the Idol machine has been a great thing for Clarkson, who sometimes takes on the role of the pop world’s ombudsman when she’s defending her former show against the “authenticity” police or rolling her eyes at former Idol meanie Simon Cowell’s declarations that she’s not interested in being a pop star. That Stronger allows her to drop the façade that other pop stars might depend on for dear life, and address both the characters in her songs and her audience directly, speaks both to Clarkson’s charm and to her growing maturity as an artist.

Pre-Pearl Jam glam-punks trigger feelings of

Listening to the scant amount of material recorded by the Seattle glam-punk act Mother Love Bone can often trigger feelings of, “What if?” What if, instead of passing away of a heroin overdose shortly before the release of his band’s debut album, the grandiose Apple, lead singer Andrew Wood had lived? Would the band’s gritty, yet achingly vulnerable take on arena rock have supercharged a cultural movement toward glitter eye shadow and platform boots? Would pleather have taken the place of flannel? Would Eddie Vedder still be surfing?

Mother Love Bone’s music existed on a precipice between the larger-than-life hard rock that was just starting to fall out of favor in 1990 and the bleaker, more low-end-heavy music that would eventually be dubbed “grunge.” But the catalytic factor was Wood, a self-proclaimed disciple of Freddie Mercury and Marc Bolan who laid all his romantic dreams — of grandeur on the stage and in the bedroom, of meeting a woman who’s “just like me, only beautiful” — absolutely bare in a way that, at its best, remains absolutely unnerving even on multiple listens.

To be fair, Wood was backed by a top-notch band that helped drive along his vision: Bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard, late of the legendary Green River and later of the grunge-era icons Pearl Jam, helped lay the foundation, and squealing solos by Bruce Fairweather added the requisite amount of flash. (A live version of “I’m In Love With My Car” floating around proves that Wood’s dreams of being Freddie Mercury Mach II would have been ably assisted by his bandmates.) Songs like the chugging “Heartshine” and the stormy “Mr. Danny Boy” stalk and preen, with Wood’s slightly nasal vocals exhorting the audience to “value love supreme”; at his best, his frontman style was not unlike that of a particularly exhortative street preacher, someone encouraging as many followers as he possibly could to follow him to other astral planes.

“Capricorn Sister” shows the band at its apex, with Wood’s vocals multitracked in such a way that it sounds like his subconscious-inspired rantings are being beamed in from space while a trashy, wahing lead guitar skulks around in the background. (Note that the track also represents one of the few times in the history of rock when a band shouting out its own name actually works; this is probably because of the chaotic glee inherent in the track, as shown by liberal use of the wah pedal and Wood, at one point, letting loose a cackle.)

The posthumous collection encompasses Apple and the bulk of the 1989 EP Shine, which has slightly rougher production (not to mention a Ricky Ricardo imitation from Wood). It closes with the two-part epic “Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns,” which is probably the band’s most well-known composition thanks to Cameron Crowe’s tendency to include it on his films’ soundtracks and Pearl Jam’s live versions; it’s a resigned ode to romance, one that sings of “my kind of love/ the kind that moves on/ the kind that leaves me alone” as it builds to its climax with a big old jam session, the kind that could stretch out for days. That it has to end eventually is, of course, inevitable; that Mother Love Bone’s career came to the premature close that it did, though, remains sad to this day.

Balancing genuine menace and chaos with a clear pop sensibility

The debut album from Guns N' Roses landed with a loud thunk in 1987, the year Mötley Crüe began its descent into its first dark period with the release of the unfortunate Girls, Girls, Girls and poppier acts like Europe and Poison were (perhaps inadvertently) playing up their campiest aspects with the heavy use of synthesizers and lip gloss. Appetite For Destruction planted its flag in a void; here was a hard-rock album with 12 songs that balanced genuine menace and chaos — not the "Satan's going to get you" kind, but the kind that could be lurking on the streets of Anycity, U.S.A. — with a clear pop sensibility.

Many of the monster riffs on Appetite have entered the pop-culture firmament for good; the sky-cracking guitar line that opens "Welcome to the Jungle" and announces the album's arrival; the pealing solo that starts "Sweet Child O' Mine," the bombastic party signal that pushes "Paradise City" along. Then there are the songs that weren't radio hits, but are easily recognizable to many; the half-sneering, half-agape "My Michelle," the predatory "It's So Easy," the heroin fable "Mr. Brownstone." And "Rocket Queen," the six-minute epic that closes out side two, probably realized Guns frontman Axl Rose's ambitions to make a grand, sweeping Rock Statement better than anything on either of the Use Your Illusion albums; in it, Rose's narrator's flips from nasty boy to emotional bedrock over guitars that sound like they were played with razor blades.

It's hard to not talk about Appetite without a bit of rumination on GNR Mach I, which seems so perfectly-calibrated it could have been the concoction of a twisted boy-band mogul. The caterwauling Rose and his fleet-fingered sidekick/foil Slash were the MTV era's analogue to the Toxic Twins, a pairing of nastiness and sweetness that was so well-blended it was up to the listener to figure out which was which. (Although it's a testament to Rose's particular brand of charisma that he could inspire arenas full of women to sing along with the line "Turn around, bitch, I got a use for you/ Besides, you ain't got nothin' better to do and I'm bored" as if it was a line nicked from a love letter). There was the aloof Izzy Stradlin, the high school friend of Rose's who provided the band with its Stones-like swagger; the Seattle expatriate Duff McKagan, who spent time knocking around that city's punk scene (he even drummed for the Fastbacks for a bit) before signing on to play bass; and the goofy Steven Adler, who despite his ever-present shaggy-dog grin could lay down intricate beats over which the rest of the guys did their thing.

That this version of the band didn't last very long is probably part of the point; indeed, some of those people clamoring for a reunion of the lineup now are probably looking to recapture a moment in time when things seemed both more grimy and more hopeful — when rock and roll could, conceivably, save the day. Or, failing that, one of those wearying hours before sunrise.

Harvey spoke with eMusic’s Maura Johnston in January about her writing process, why she felt like now was the time to get political, and how she was influenced by Harold Pinter and the Doors during the album’s gestation.

The record’s really autoharp heavy. I wanted to know how that affected writing process, and what made you decide to use the autoharp as the guiding musical force for a lot of the album.

Well, I began to play the autoharp around 2007-08. At that time, I was playing solo shows in support of the album White Chalk. I was trying to find new ways of playing some older material, and I thought about trying to play “Down by the Water” on an autoharp, and it turned out really beautifully. I began to really love the sound, and wanted to explore that instrument more. It worked really well for this latest album, because I wrote the words first over a period of about a year and a half. I only concentrated on writing the words, almost like poems that had to work on the page. And then when I had edited down those works to what the words were that I thought were working – because it took me a long, long time – I think there were probably 30 or 40 pieces, of which I got rid of about half. And then I just sang the words for a long time. Again, not using instruments, and so the words formed the melody, but obviously the words already have their rhythm, so then they helped form the melody. When I had the melody, the autoharp worked very well, because then I only had to find the chord that fit with the note I was singing. Being that the autoharp is a chord instrument, it was the perfect writing tool for this record, and that’s why it very easily became what half of the record was written on. On the others I’ve used the more known chordal instrument, which of course is the guitar, but the autoharp has this beautiful orchestral slant at your fingertips. It’s a very wide breadth of notes and many different octaves and it has great fullness and melody to it already and quite inherently.

I heard you used three of them that were tuned to different progressions.

Yeah, I bought three old autoharps and I took them to a wonderful little musical repairman who lives around here in Dorset and who can do anything with any acoustic instrument. And so I took them to him and said that I’d like him to put them into the strangest chord configurations he could possibly think of. You don’t often come across autoharps that are tuned in very unusual keys. But that’s what I was looking for because, again, it lends a very strange quality to the music. It takes it into a slightly different world.

I love how there’s a dreamlike feel over a lot of the music on the album. I think the autoharp really lends itself to that feeling.

Yes, it does. Also, the little loops of music lend themselves to that dreamlike quality as well. And I’m really glad that you’ve picked up on that, because it was something I kept in the forefront of my mind throughout the entire writing of that project. I was very much after that dreamscape and to create music that was quite difficult to pin down. Almost like it didn’t have an anchor, but it was ongoing and had a timelessness to it which I think it works very well with the nature of the words.

When you incorporated the loops from other songs, how did those come into play? What brought those bits into your process?

There would often be a line, like for instance the “blood and fire” line in Niney’s song, or for instance, “What if I take my problems to the United Nations” in “Summertime Blues” by Eddie Cochran. Those lines would court me; I’d think of them so much, because they were very much in tandem with what I was trying to create lyrically and in my poetry. And then I began to weave them in, so I would almost hear the rhythm of the line as I was writing my words. Then, therefore, sometimes it would also have a place within the music whether it was me singing it or whether it was actually introducing a section of the song into it.

This project has a lot of talk about the world at large. What inspired that? Did you write it when you were in England or did you start writing when you were on tour?

I was in England, I was in Dorset throughout the writing of this record. I’ve always been profoundly affected by what’s going on in the world and what’s going on politically. But I’ve never felt that I was okay in my abilities as a writer to be able to put that into music as words and do it well. Because I think it’s a very, very difficult thing to do well in music. Some people do it well but very few, I think. And I didn’t feel I had the qualities yet as a writer to do it. And I think now I’m a bit older, I’ve been writing for longer. And I feel in the last few years I’ve worked very hard on my lyric writing and for the first time felt that it was something I could approach in my own work. I really haven’t had the confidence to do it before, even though I’ve always felt very, very affected by the contemporary world that we’re living in. So it really was a case of for the first time feeling the confidence to begin to try to approach subjects such as these, coupled with becoming more and more frustrated, impassioned, and angry at these things I see happening the older I get. I certainly don’t seem to be getting more used to it. It makes me more angry than ever. It was almost like, “I have to begin to try to address these things in my own work.” And having been given this wonderful position that I can sing and my voice gets heard, I felt like I wanted to start trying to make my voice say things that are hopefully meaningful and things that will last.

I think a lot of the lyrics are really striking in just the way that they portray war and sadness – it is a dreamscape but it’s a very sad dream in a lot of ways.

Well, yes, I use a lot of visceral imagery because that’s the world that we’re living in. You can’t avoid it if you’re dealing in the real world. This is the world that we’re living in. And although I talk about a dreamscape in the music, I feel like the words themselves are not a dream at all. This is actually happening, and has happened, and what always happens. When I talked about a musical “dreamscape,” I was meaning more sort of indefinable quality. I listened to the music of the Doors quite a lot when I was writing this album, specifically because I find their music so hard to pin down. A lot of that comes from the instrumentation. They didn’t use a bass guitar particularly, but the Fender Rhodes, the keyboards, they were moving all the time. That wonderful playing gave it such a fluidity. That was something of the quality I was trying to get into the music that I was making as well. And I also associate their music with the Vietnam War in particular, and how that whole war was almost so terrible it seemed like it couldn’t possibly be happening, but it was. I wanted to create in music this sense of timelessness in the fact that this would always be. This is the cycle. This terrible cycle, of war and conflict and hurting each other, that we do.

So the church that you recorded in: is that near where you grew up?

It’s quite near. It’s about a half an hour drive away from where I grew up. It’s by a stretch of coastline that overlooks the channel. It’s in a wonderful position. It’s quite a remote church on the top of a hill. These days it’s not particularly used for services other than funerals and baptisms. It’s mostly used as an art space for oil paintings and for classical music.

Earlier you said that there were some people who you felt wrote political songs well. Are there any who particularly stand out to you?

Yes, and not just musicians, but poets as well. I’ve been affected by the work of Harold Pinter lately, particularly Harold Pinter’s political essays and his poetry. A wonderful, wonderful poet, who is somebody I think speaks about these things very well, and gets the balance right. In terms of music, Neil Young, obviously, throughout the years has written a great many songs, many of them political and many of them getting the balance just right. I’m always interested in what Neil Young is doing. And I’ve been thinking of also Captain Beefheart. I came across the song “Dachau Blues,” and I thought, “What an amazing song, what a brilliant protest song it is.” Those are just a few examples of people who I think do get that balance right that I was trying to achieve, because I didn’t want to just come across as almost preaching or protesting or chest-beating in any way. I wanted to find a different kind of language that was still very provocative but leaving a certain amount of things unsaid, and I think these people do that very well.

Right now I feel that musical artists are pressured to say more than ever with the explosion of media and online outlets. How do you feel about the way that has shifted since you entered the industry?

Well, obviously it’s changed enormously since I first began in 1990. I don’t really speak for myself in that I’m not somebody that partakes in wanting to spread as much of myself around as possible. That’s just not the focus of my energy, and I just focus on trying to make my writing improve and hopefully get better at what I do. At the same time it’s the way things are changing and I hope that good things will come from it. It’s still relatively new and in relatively early days.

And then you’re also working with a photojournalist who has done war reporting for the visuals of the record.

Yes, a man called Seamus Murphy, who I came across through seeing an exhibition of his in 2008 which was an exhibition for work he’d done for the last 10 years in Afghanistan. I was so moved by this exhibition and felt something in it of what I was trying to achieve with this record. He mostly works as a photojournalist, and often in conflict zones.

And I read that he’s doing visual accompaniments for every song on the record.

He is. We’ll continue to release his films up through the rest of next couple of months, and then he’s going to be making a long-form film after that of some of the work that he’s done throughout this whole project. He basically did a road trip through England whilst listening to my album, and these are the images he came back with. And it’s very much his own interpretation, and I’m glad for that, because that’s what I wanted. The thing that first drew me to his work was his very unique vision and that’s certainly what I feel that’s what he’s bringing to this.

The first clip is really beautiful and striking.

There’s a lot of silence of it. Things that are unsaid, and that’s something I always admire and something I always strive for myself.

Planting PJ Harvey's flag as a musical force to be reckoned with

Eighteen years on, the debut album from PJ Harvey still sounds fairly astonishing because of its sheer rawness; it opens with a dissonant guitar chord and Harvey wailing "Oh, my lover," and somehow manages to get more raw from there, tying up notions of femininity and sexuality and what, exactly a "woman in rock" should present herself as in a messy, but utterly arresting package. "Sheela-Na-Gig," in which Harvey wrestles with the notion of female sexuality's worth and worthlessness over her band's frenzied playing, probably encapsulates the album's overall mood the best; it was also the lone Stateside "hit" from Dry (it garnered some play from alt-rock stations in the halcyon days before that format's hostile takeover by wounded males). The propulsive "Dress" and the barreling "Joe" both cloak their longing for companionship in furious inversions of the rock formula, while the minimalist "Plants and Rags" ratchets up its feelings of insanity and desperation with a cello part that veers from placid accompaniment to a manic solo that sounds as if it's being played as part of a life-or-death bet. Dry planted PJ Harvey's flag as a musical force to be reckoned with; that it only served as a precursor to Harvey's later reinventions instead of yet another promising debut that went nowhere is a testament to both her artistic reinvention and her inherent mettle.

All jagged edges and spat-out lyrics

After the relative splendor of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, PJ Harvey went back to exploring the beauty through dredging through sonic murk that characterized so much of her earlier work. Uh Huh Her is all jagged edges and spat-out lyrics, harkening back to the Rid of Me era in both its sonics and mechanics; Harvey produced the album herself, played most of the instruments on the album, and sought out low-quality equipment on which to perform the songs, some of which sound like sketches committed to record a la 4-Track Demos. But while it's tempting to say that the sometimes-ugly Uh Huh Her was an inevitable reaction to the settled Stories, the themes here remain constant with the ones she's explored over the course of her career; on "The Letter" she uses a pen as an extension of her sexual longing for someone who she wants to "be different" with, while "Who The Fuck?" echoes some of her earliest work, with Harvey telling an impossible-to-shake lover to "get your dirty fingers/ outta my hair" over guitars that sound like popping pistols. This isn't to say that the whole album rifles around the dark side; "You Came Through" is a gentle, airy examination of a friendship on which Harvey's voice quivers as she recalls being saved by an important bond.

An enduring, beautiful testament to the transformative power of love

Perhaps PJ Harvey's most accessible record (complete with Thom Yorke cameo!), Stories is full of straightforward rock 'n' roll tracks — straightforward, at least, in the context of Harvey's catalog, which is to say that the songs here aren't exactly arena-ready. Still, from the first ringing guitar note on "Big Exit," in which she declares her intentions to face the crazy world as long as her lover's by her side, Harvey puts her emotions and her melodies front-and-center in a way that's simultaneously disarming and rapturous. While there is some exploring of the dank underbellies of the world — see the end-of-the-affair duet with Yorke "This Mess We're In," the love-as-war howl "Kamikaze," or the examination of urban striving "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" — there's also what might be the best love song in her body of work, the love letter to a lover and to New York "Big Exit," and the declaration of something resembling inner peace "Horses In My Dreams."

Even with its explorations of love's darker themes, Stories has a brightness about it compared to the rest of Harvey's catalog #&8212; mind you, it's the brightness of a rain-slicked city afternoon as opposed to, say, a beach. The guitars chime, Harvey's voice echoes in such a way that it feels like it's booming down from on high, and even the quietest tracks like "Beautiful Feeling" have a radiance. The album's closing track, "We Float," serves well both as a come-down from the record's highest points and as a coda to the less strangled, more settled depictions of romance that make up much of the record. Harvey employs the higher register of her voice to look back on a romance that was all flash and excess and sugar-rush excitement — until all the heady emotions became too much to bear, and Harvey and her lover become forced to take the most adult route that they can: "We float/ take life as it comes," she sings. If it sounds like a slightly weary perspective, well, that's because it is. But that weariness is also something that marks a certain kind of maturity, and the simple expression of it on this song holds at least part of the key to why Stories is such an enduring, beautiful testament to the transformative power of love.

Not all the sessions, but a strong narrative arc that certainly makes it worth owning

PJ Harvey had a particularly fruitful relationship with the tastemaking Radio 1 DJ John Peel; he shone the spotlight on her during a guest-critic stint at the British music rag Melody Maker, in which he dubbed 1991 debut single "Dress" the mag's single of the week. (This was during a time when those sorts of proclamations from dead-tree publications carried particular clout; Britpop mainstays like Suede and Pulp also enjoyed this honor.) Peel brought PJ Harvey in for many sessions on his influential radio show and while this collection unfortunately doesn't compile them all, there's a strong narrative arc that certainly makes it worth owning. The appearance PJ Harvey made in the wake of the Melody Maker accolade is here in its entirety, as are takes on rarities like the raunchy standard "Wang Dang Doodle" (which was a b-side to the "Man-Size" single) and the To Bring You My Love-era preface "Naked Cousin" (which appeared on the soundtrack to The Crow: City of Angels). It closes out with a performance of the Uh Huh Her track "You Came Through" that was recorded at a Peel tribute shortly after his untimely passing in 2004; that song's message of overwhelming gratitude for a friendship particularly resonates, thanks to Harvey's stripped-down performance.

The femininity on display amplifies how harrowing her lyrics can be

The cover of White Chalk shows a harshly lit Harvey sitting in a white dress, as if she's posing for an overly formalized portrait; that overly lit feeling permeates the album, on which Harvey dispenses with the standard guitar-bass-drums rock setup in favor of piano (an instrument she taught herself during White Chalk's recording) and zither. Most of Harvey's catalog has a solid aural footing — even on the stripped-down tracks presented on 4-Track Demos, there's a grounding in the low end present that propels the overall musical action forward. But White Chalk has a lighter-than-air feeling about it, thanks to the timbre of the instrumentation, the lack of drums on many of the tracks, and Harvey's decision to sing in a higher register that plays up the innate girlishness of her voice. (This quality hasn't been as consistently prominent in Harvey's music since the release of Demonstration, the collection of demos that was packaged with the limited-edition run of Dry.) The femininity on display amplifies just how harrowing her lyrics can be; "When Under Ether" very clinically describes the feeling of euphoria one gets when anaesthetics kick in, while "The Piano" is a harrowing depiction of familial discord and loneliness that's marked by a chorus of ghostlike Harveys moaning, over and over, "Oh God, I miss you."

White Chalk closes with "The Mountain," a damnation of a straying lover that ends with Harvey, her voice in its highest register, wailing over arpeggios that reach higher and higher in a seeming effort to keep up with her enraged, ever-expanding voice. When it comes to an end, it almost seems that it did because Harvey's energy had been spent, thanks to exhaustion resulting from both her having to emotionally deal with the betrayal and desperately needing to provide herself with some sort of catharsis.

More of an odds-and-sods collection than its companion

Use Your Illusion II feels like more of an odds-and-sods collection than its companion album, thanks in part to the inclusion of tracks originally released elsewhere. The overwrought cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" and the album-opening protest-song tribute "Civil War" had both been released in 1990; the spitfire put-down "You Could Be Mine" was more associated with the 1991 blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Even the version of "Don't Cry" on this album was the alternate version, relegated to stunt showings on MTV.

But there are still a few solid tracks to be found among the detritus — indeed, there are more than enough to make a GNR completist want to cherry-pick the best bits from the two Illusion albums and combine a single killer set. Chief among those tracks is "Pretty Tied Up," a sinewy track that marries sadomasochistic metaphors with a cautionary tale about the record industry and that has one of the best basslines on the album (it's probably second only to the pulsing beat that propels "You Could Be Mine"). "So Fine" — dedicated to the New York Dolls' Johnny Thunders, who passed away in 1991 — has Duff McKagan assuming lead-vocal duties, and his cracked pipes serve the song's mournful adulation well. And the breakup mini-epic "Locomotive" is full of hatred directed at both the self and a spurned lover, with a coda, over which Axl Rose moans while a piano vamps and Slash plays a searing blues solo, that might be one of the best points on the whole Illusion collection.

There's even a bit of foreshadowing as far as where rock music will go in the ensuing years. "Get In The Ring," Rose's naming-names ode to all the magazine editors and other evildoers who have wronged him, now seems like a precursor to the Twitter age, where musicians can take on those who they feel have unfairly quaffed a bit too much haterade. And the album-closing "My World," an electronic romp through a paranoid landscape over which Rose's distorted voice rants about being in a "socio-psychotic state of bliss," is in hindsight a fairly obvious harbinger of the artistic direction he'd take (for better or worse) on the long-incubating Chinese Democracy.

Surprisingly good despite its overreaching — or because of it

A Wings cover, a 10-minute mini-opera that recalls Bloodrock's "D.O.A.," multiple songs that cross the five-minute mark, an Alice Cooper cameo, a waltz…the list of odd things about the first half of Guns N' Roses' 1991 diptych can stretch on and on. Is this the same band who offered up the lean, mean Appetite For Destruction only four years prior? Well, yes, at least sort of — by this time, drummer Steven Adler had left the building, the Cult's Matt Sorum had replaced him, keyboardist Dizzy Reed was grafted onto the band's lineup, and Izzy Stradlin was on the way out. Those changes in personnel were but the beginning of switch-ups for GNR, who were still the biggest rock band in the world at this point; indeed, much of the lyrical content on the album deals head-on with that fact.

Given the list of indulgences laid out above (including the meta-rock-star content), one might assume that Use Your Illusion I is a bit too much, a lot of pounds of rock in a bag that can hold about half that amount. But it's a surprisingly good listen despite its overreaching — or, indeed, because of it at times. Take the Wings cover, which only slightly reimagines its source material ("Live and Let Die") yet manages to serve as an effective showcase for Rose's strangled screams; or the waltz, which is a campfire-sing-along kiss-off on which Rose and Stradlin harmonize with Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon.

There are other highlights as well, many of which occur when the band most aggressively flaunts its Rolling Stones influence: Two songs have the cooler-than-cool Stradlin on vocals, including the shambling "Dust N' Bones"; "Bad Obsession," another entry into the catalog of songs that could be about indulging in either drugs or women, is one of the album's most swaggering moments; and the one-two punch of "Bad Apples" and "Dead Horse" bring a bit of mood-lightening barroom blooze to the record's back end. "Garden of Eden" is a speedy rundown of Rose's grievances with the society of the time during which he ranted so quickly, the accompanying video had a "follow the bouncing ball" conceit superimposed over its lyrics. And then there's "November Rain," the long-marinating Rose ballad that one suspects he committed to record because his stature allowed him to finally afford it the full mini-opera treatment; it also has Slash's most pealingly romantic solo since "Sweet Child O' Mine."

One of R&B's brightest new talents

Philadelphia soul singer Jazmine Sullivan has a lusty, untameable voice, and it serves her well on her second full-length, which is soaked in retro tropes (thanks in part to her mentor Missy Elliott). The album kicks off with "Holdin' You Down (Goin' In Circles)," which finds Sullivan pleading to her lover over a stew of beats borrowed from the likes of Doug E. Fresh and Nas. Which isn't to say she's all about pleading; "Don't Make Me Wait" is a peppy Prince homage that finds Sullivan trying out her falsetto, while her hate-to-lovers' duet with Ne-Yo "You Get On My Nerves" is full of so much snappy back-and-forth it's hard not to think that the two should start collaborating on a rom-com musical immediately. Sullivan is one of R&B's brightest new talents, and Love Me Back is a thrillingly catchy showcase for that fact.

Littered with body parts and fluids, and the emotions brought forth by their deployment

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 voice (called "Man-Size Sextet"), that perhaps best encapsulate the tension that's all over the album; while the Albini-engineered "Man-Size" has at least a bit of foreplay involved before Harvey breaks into a caterwaul on the song's final chorus, on the string-assisted version (which was arranged by Harvey's percussionist Robert Ellis) nerves crackle and snap against each other thanks to the strings clashing against each other in an icy, dissonant way as Harvey declares her dominance — at times, though, she does it in such a controlled way that it sounds like she's communicating through a jaw wired shut from repressed desire. The beauty brought forth by the strings only serves to underscore the jitters brought on by the idea of possibly possessing what is desired; that fear isn't brought on by the idea of possible transcendence as much as it is borne by the idea of losing that always-desired feeling, and subsequently having to root around the ugly, unfulfilling world of debasement and thwarted intentions explored elsewhere on the album.

A testament to Harvey's artistic intent from the first impulse

Many attributed the hostile sound of Rid of Me to Steve Albini's engineering, but the early versions of many of the songs on that album collected here suggest that the songs themselves had quite a few demons lurking within. (It's worth noting that the release of the Rid of Me demos has a precedent; Dry was released, in limited edition, with Demonstration, which collected the early versions of each song on that album and presented them in identical order.) 4-Track Demos is a testament to the presence of Harvey's artistic intent from the first impulse; Harvey's caterwaul on the earliest versions of Rid of Me standouts like "Legs" and "Ecstasy" is in fine form, while the slightly slower version of "50ft Queenie" here reveals the essential swagger of both Harvey the artist and the song itself. The tracks not presented in fuller form on Rid of Me also are worth a listen for fans who don't necessarily consider themselves completists — the distortion-amplified dreams of raunch-filled decadence in "Reeling," in particular, cut through the speakers like a knife, and the slow, anguished burn of "Hardly Wait" is reminiscent of the most frustrated moments on Dry.

An astonishing document of female sexuality and all its contradictions

Like its studio predecessor Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love fades in slowly and deliberately, a menacing single-string guitar riff serving as the entr'acte to PJ Harvey's despondent growl, which is placed so up-front in the mix that it sounds distorted beyond repair. The funereal atmosphere of the first track, in which Harvey growls and then wails over the tribulations she has gone through in order to be with a lover, sets the tone for the tracks that follow, which marry the sublime and the profane in a way that she hadn't committed to record before. The breakout hit "Down By The Water" is a perfect example of the way Love explored and exploited those tensions; Harvey's voice is recorded in an achingly up-close way, her trembling alto describing an innocence lost while strings and electronics gradually encroach on it.

After the stripped-down harshness of Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love can be seen as something of a move toward lushness — the album was produced by Harvey, her ex-bandmate John Parish, and Mark "Flood" Ellis (the latter of whom had recently worked on Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral and U2's Zooropa). But that word should be used to signify an expansion of Harvey's sonic palette more than a smoothing of it. Harvey's signature wail not only distorts itself in ways heretofore unheard on record, and it's also recorded in a way that's sometimes so up-close as to be uncomfortable, particularly given the startlingly intimate nature of the lyrics. The raw stomp of the sexual flag-plant "Meet Ze Monsta" and the anguished ode to repressed desire "Long Snake Moan" have their sexual aggression highlighted by the distortion littered all over them, while the strummed-guitar balladry of "C'mon Billy" is given an extra gravity by an almost menacing string section. Sometimes the lyrics have a deceptive simplicity about them; in "Teclo" Harvey asks, over and over again, to "ride on [a lover's] grace for a while," and the repetition of that simple, cryptic request reveals a longing better than any lengthy treatise that another, lesser artist could toss off.

To Bring You My Love is an astonishing document of female sexuality and all its contradictions; innocence is lost and found, power is lost and gained and lost once again, ecstasy is reached and seemingly unattainable. Throughout, though, Harvey's never-quenched willingness to explore her boundaries — both in terms of the album's sonics and her own willingness to drop the veil between herself and the microphone — makes the album one worth returning to again and again.