P.J. Harvey, To Bring You My Love
Featured Album
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.
