P.J. Harvey, Is This Desire?
Featured Album
Stretching both her songwriting muscles and her technical capabilities
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.
