Icon: P.J. Harvey
Polly Jean Harvey was a notable figure in rock music almost from the exact moment she emerged in late 1991, which serendipitously happened to be a time when women were allowed to do more in rock than hang around and ogle the men on stage. She took the ball handed to her by both the British music press and the early ’90s alt-rock boom and has been sprinting with it ever since; her catalog, which spans nearly 20 years, is all over the artistic map, ranging from sumptuous, beat-heavy songs like “Down By the Water” to agitated rockers like “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore” to the complete reinvention of her sound on the piano-and-zither-heavy White Chalk. Despite these stylistic shifts, her artistic ethos – which confronts femininity and performance and anger head-on, without ever shying toward more easy-to-swallow ideas for the sake of placating the masses – has been constant throughout.
In Chronological Order
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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.
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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.
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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. -
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.
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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.
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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. -
On Is This Desire? Harvey utilizes more machine-generated beats than on previous efforts, and despite her wail being reduced to a whisper on songs like the hushed "The Wind" the overall effort still smolders. The technologies and techniques used on Desire? place it in its historical moment, with the heavy beats on songs like "My Beautiful Leah" and "No Girl So Sweet" grounding the album right at the end of the '90s;... other tracks like the Salinger-borrowing murder ballad "A Perfect Day Elise," the mournful piano lament "The River" and the Flannery O'Connor-inspired "Joy" marry Harvey's wail to the time's technologies in a less obtrusive way. Harvey herself has said that Desire? is the best record she's ever made, in part because of its status as an album in which she stretched both her songwriting muscles and her technical capabilities while binning sniping from critics who weren't sure of her new direction.
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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."
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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. -
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.
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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.
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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."
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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. -
The ghosts of Polly Harvey's half-remembered childhood come seeping through the floorboards on Let England Shake — snatches of songs that would have played over battered transistors as she was hitting adolescence in the rural British town of Dorset, ghostly images of old friends and fallen leaders, anecdotes of centuries-old skirmishes fought and lost on its plains and in its hills. They show up the way memories do: at random and haphazardly,... sometimes welcome and warming, sometimes rude and insistent. They bleed into her songs with no regard to their rhythm or construction; a fragment of "Reville" blasts rudely across "The Glorious Land," "The Words that Maketh Murder" surrenders in its final moments to a snatch of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues," and the xylophone that opens "Let England Shake" is a loose interpolation of the Four Lads' "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," (clearer in an early performance) — a sly nod to the fluidity of national identity.
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That's not accidental: England is Harvey's love letter to and, occasionally, bitter reproach of, her homeland. Recorded in a church near Harvey's birthplace and bolstered by expert underplaying of longtime collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey, the album is both familial and strange, a valentine cooed from a crooked mouth, the kind of sonnet that makes room for lines like, "let's head out to the fountain of death."
Harvey's no stranger to internal conflict: On her best records, 1993's Rid of Me and 1995's To Bring You My Love, she used a manic yowl and slash-and-burn guitar tactics to explore the crippling — and frequently crazy-making — dualities of love. They were twin engines of desire and despair. Rid of Me was the hot, fast fire, but Love found Harvey covered in soot and kicking around in the ash. It was a scorched, primal blues record, one that opened with notions of love's sacrifice and ended with Harvey alone, crying to a deaf god over a lover who had abandoned her. They work both in tandem with and opposition to one another. On Rid of Me, Harvey is tough and confrontational — she's "coming up man-size" and comparing herself to cosmonaut Yuri G; on Love, she's dead and drowned before the album even starts.
England traffics in those same polarities, but transfers the object of affection from a person to a place. Harvey's relationship with her homeland is complex: In "The Last Living Rose," she's affectionate, spitting "Goddamn Europeans — take me back to beautiful England" over a bare guitar strum; but just one song later she's acrid and bitter, sneering, "What is the glorious fruit of our land? The fruit is deformed children" as a mirage-like ocean of guitar and bass ripples and surges behind her (and if you think we're off the hook across the pond, think again: She sings "Oh, America" just as often as she sings "Oh, England"). If its lyrics are any indication, much of the album's titular shaking is from cannon fire. The ghosts of dead soldiers run wild across the songs; they fall "like lumps of meat" in "The Words That Maketh Murder," their limbs landing in tree branches, bloody and grotesque; they turn the beach in "All and Everyone" into "a bank of red earth/ dripping down death." But for all her disappointment, Harvey never sinks to polemic. Her anger springs from the same place as her affection: "Undaunted, never-failing love for you, England," she sighs at one point, "is all to which I cling."
For at least half of the album, Harvey's voice is high-pitched and mangled, a witchlike shriek that imbues the songs with the menace of black magick (She sings the line "England's dancing days are done" like she's reading it off an Ouija Board). The sonics throughout are warped and blurry. Nothing is crisp and there are no hard edges. Instead, the music drifts by as hazy and surreal as a dream, stocked with familiar faces and people and events all melting together. Her appropriation of old songs whole-cloth is a masterful touch. They seem to drift up from the deepest recesses of her subconscious. She cackles out "On Battleship Hill" like a vampire castrata, the jagged edges of her voice puncturing the netting of autoharp. "Hanging in the Wire" swings to the other extreme, the two Harveys (Polly and Mick) murmuring lyrics over icicles of piano.
The album reaches its apotheosis in the magnificent fever dream "Written on the Forehead." From a construction standpoint, it's a masterpiece. Harvey steals the chorus of Niney the Observer's "Blood and Fire" and glues it to the middle of a song that buckles like a vinyl record in the summer sun. And after an album's worth of opposition, Harvey at last commingles the twin fires of passion and destruction, issuing to both the same joyous, repeated command: "Let it burn, let it burn, let it burn, burn, burn." – J. Edward Keyes
