The many musical faces of Polly Jean Harvey
As the U.K. singer releases her ninth album, we look at her wildly varied oeuvre
Now that David Bowie has shuffled off this mortal coil, PJ Harvey might be the closest thing we’ve got left.
The iconoclastic English art-pop auteur released her ninth studio solo album in 24 years last Friday, the deceptively devastating agit- folk song cycle The Hope Six Demolition Project, and, once again, it didn’t bother much with sounding like whatever you might expect a PJ Harvey album to sound like — if you still expect a PJ Harvey album to sound anything like what she’s done before.
Even Hope Six’s creation was fittingly unique. Harvey cut part of the record behind one-way glass before a handful of very, very lucky fans during a month-long run of studio sessions at London’s Somerset House, once the site of a Tudor palace, early last year. And before that — as an extension of the scholarly inquiries into the human consequences of war begun with 2011’s exceptional Let England Shake — she travelled to Afghanistan, Kosovo and the uglier reaches of Washington, D.C., to gain a roving diarist’s appreciation of three locales brought to their knees by three very different types of conflict.
Alot to take in? You bet. Harvey has never shown any interest in making it easy, least of all for herself. As she told me in an incredibly hard-to-get interview in San Francisco in 2011: “I don’t want to just keep using the same material all the time because it’s what I’m accustomed to. I’m very curious. I want to learn new things, and my whole life has always been like that, no matter what I’m working on.”
With Bowie sadly gone, she’s probably the purest art-for-art’s-sake rock ’n’ roller still operating at such a level of mainstream visibility. So here’s a bluffer’s guide to The Many Faces of Polly Jean Harvey:
All-in art-punk outsider
PJ Harvey’s Dry was beyond comparison when it arrived in 1992 and still is today. Just 22 years old and fresh from rural/coastal Dorset in England, she and a limber power trio named in her honour unintentionally caught a bit of the grunge-era femme-rock zeitgeist being ushered in by Hole, Babes in Toyland and Juliana Hatfield while dealing in a cryptic species of folkish punk that nakedly revelled in and/or tore apart every ideal of “femininity” in rock you could think of.
Listen: “Sheela-Na-Gig.” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if it had been written about 11th-century fertility idols sporting oversized vaginas.
50ft Queenie
Harvey’s second album, 1993’s Rid of Me, received a legendarily scorching — and divisive — production job at the hands of esteemed punk recordist Steve Albini, but it left little doubt as to the stripped-down wallop of the original PJ Harvey trio or the daunting star power of the shy young wom- an out in front. Opener “Rid of Me” will still blow your speakers if you’re not careful.
Listen: “50ft Queenie.” Took the boys to school. Still does.
Alternate-universe blues diva
The first of many extreme Harvey studio makeovers to come, 1995’s To Bring You My Love distilled all the tension of her first two albums to a tightly coiled, entirely unnerving species of oozing, nightmare-blues dread that no one else has ever even tried to duplicate. Oddly enough, Harvey’s scarlet-clad persona in the “Down by the Water” video helped make it a sort of sleeper hit.
Listen: “Down by the Water.” The closest Harvey has come to a “pop hit.”
Poetess/experimentalist
The doors opened wide upon innu- merable artistic possibilities on 1998’s Is This Desire?, wherein Harvey and producer Flood generously employed electronics to catapult her increasingly confident and literarily minded songwriting into myriad widescreen directions hinted at on To Bring You My Love. It’s still a jawdropping ride 18 years on and this writer is inclined to agree with comments Harvey subsequently made to the Daily Telegraph: “I do think Is This Desire? is the best record I ever made — maybe ever will make — and I feel that that was probably the highlight of my career.”
Listen: “A Perfect Day Elise.” Harvey at the dramatic, maximalist height of her powers.
Artsy-fartsy avant-gardist
Dance Hall at Louse Point (1996) was a pointedly challenging and theatrical work that saw our girl PJ faithful- ly folding herself into numerous lyrical and vocal personas suggested by collaborator John Parish’s oft-challenging instrumental compositions. Unsurprisingly, it barely registered as a blip on the radar with non-diehards and has, to date, registered barely 50,000 copies sold with Neilsen SoundScan.
Listen: “Is That All There Is?” Doesn’t unseat the Peggy Lee version as definitive, but an appropriately strange cover from a strange album.
The new Patti Smith
There were hints of Patti on earlier albums, but on 2000’s sparkling Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, Harvey landed in New York City and turned in an album that bears the unmistakable stamp of Smith’s CBGB-era output. It’s probably not an accident that she titled the penultimate tune on a record that repeat- edly references Smith’s Horses “Horses in My Dreams.” PJ Harvey does nothing by accident. She won the Mercury Prize for her efforts.
Listen: “Good Fortune.” More Patti than Patti.
Gothic piano dalladeer
Having briefly tempted the mainstream with Stories from the Cities, Stories from the Sea and 2004’s Uh Huh Her, Harvey retreated to the seaside in Dorset, taught herself piano and emerged with an album’s worth of spectral, mostly keyboardbased introspection in the form of 2007’s White Chalk that, yet again, drove away all but her most faithful followers.
Listen: “White Chalk.” Tears a hole right through you, with a hint of mournful Neil Young circa On the Beach to sweeten and sadden the deal.
Protest singer
For 2011’s Let England Shake, Harvey immersed herself in Britain’s long, troubling history of war and colonization, and emerged with a poignant, folky denunciation of the folly of conquest and its human consequences. She earned another Mercury Prize for her efforts. Now, five years later, she has returned to similar thematic territory, this time gilding her call-and-response singalongs with blasts of free-jazz saxophone and roiling, live-recorded blues-rock grit, and grounding her anti-imperialist sentiment in on-the-ground observations drawn from voyages to Afghanistan and Kosovo, along with neglected stretches of Washington, D.C. At 46, PJ Harvey has yet to lose any steam.
Listen: “The Wheel.” A disturbingly jaunty tune about missing children.