By Maura Johnston, eMusic Contributor more »

By eMusic Editorial Staff, eMusic ContributorIt was a year full of surprising breakouts and breathtaking discoveries, with reliable favorites from familiar faces and strong entries from new voices. These are our Top 100 Records of 2011. more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorPJ Harvey's Let England Shake is an explicitly political album, but "explicit" treatment of lyrical subjects from Polly Jean Harvey is different than it is for other lyrical writers. The world she paints with her… more »

By J. Edward Keyes, Editor-in-ChiefThe 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorEighteen 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… more »

By Philip Sherburne, eMusic Contributor more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorPolly 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorAfter 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorOn 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorLike 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorMany 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorThe 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorThe 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorPJ 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… more »

By Maura Johnston, eMusic ContributorPerhaps 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… more »