Raw power
Remastered vinyl of a thrilling conversion from bandleader to perverse solo star. By Jude Rogers.
P.J. Harvey ★★★★★ Rid Of Me/4-Track Demos ★★★★★ To Bring You My Love/To Bring You My Love Demos UMC/ISLAND. LP
AFTER RELEASING her third LP in February 1995, P.J. Harvey bluntly laid out her mission: “I can make an album which people will, frankly, embrace – yet I’ve done exactly what I’ve wanted to do, and made a record which is as perverse as I wanted to make it.”
The 25-year-old had made quite the transition in recent years. Before To Bring You My Love, her deviant, epic masterpiece, she’d left behind the punkier, coarser approach on 1993’s Rid Of Me, as well as her band. Now, she was twisting the archetype of the bruised, ancient blues singer into something garish, dragged-up and extreme. Imagine a postmodern Beefheart funnelling her ideas through a Technicolor lens but making her music weirdly more accessible in the process. Her imagery helped: recalling Cindy Sherman’s lurid photographic alter-egos, or
Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, with a macabre twist. Here was Harvey, heavily kohled, lipstick-slicked, singing from her guts and glands, amplifying her own mythologies.
These two reissues – of remastered albums, plus demos – show the exhilarating process Polly endured to get there. Rid Of Me and 4-Track Demos present a particularly intriguing first chapter to this story, packaged together here as a set, instead of being the separate releases they once were (released five months apart in 1993). Harvey’s songs in this period are glorious, bloody creatures in both skeletal and fleshed-out forms, but she often sounds as big a sonic being on the demos as she does in the studio. Her final guitar fuzz on the demo version of Rub ’Til It Bleeds and the more direct holler on Ecstasy see her soul flashing through; the remasters make the legends of Yuri-G and 50 Foot Queenie even more stratospheric.
While Rid Of Me is all sex, lust and hunger, sounding fiercely vengeful and young all these years later, To Bring You My Love’s subjects appear wider, widescreen even. We’re on an epic journey from the moment the title track’s headstrong wanderer leads us through dry earth and floods, until we reach the girl in Send His Love To Me, left alone in the desert, for whom love becomes “a tether”, her room “a cell”.
The fabulous final versions of these songs often haven’t travelled far from their rougher cuts, possibly because Harvey’s voice, matured into a sumptuous growl, anchors the mood in enough grandeur. Teclo retains its intensity without the piano, chimes and bells she added later; Meet Ze Monsta still slams and pounds; the demo of flamenco-flecked finale The Dancer has a celebratory exclamation at its opening and the sound of whirling feet, its final version lending a cinematic dimension. These records show how brilliant it is to rise fast, like a phoenix out of fire flames.