P.J. Harvey
★★★★★
Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea ISLAND. DL/LP
Sixth instalment of monthly P.J.-on-vinyl battery.
Following a stormy tryst with Nick Cave and a breakdown during 1998’s tortuous Polly Harvey cut this free-spirited, occasionally raunchy follow-up with ‘new positivity’, offering artfully indistinct yet palpably truthful snapshots of a young woman’s transformative experiences at a transitional time of life. Most were written during a year living in New York – a Somerset girl stoked on Big Apple electricity. Sessions in rural Blighty, backed by trusty sticksman Rob Ellis and Bad Seeds multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey, presented P.J.’s bare-wire songcraft with newfound approachability. With its NYC psychogeography (You Said Something’s Manhattan panorama) and Patti Smith homage (Good Fortune, à la Dancing Barefoot), the album’s East Coast relevance only multiplied when it won the Mercury on 9/11, Harvey accepting from a Washington DC hotel room overlooking the smouldering Pentagon. A parallel Demos LP corrects its one flaw: the bloodless Thom Yorke on This Mess We’re In is substituted by Polly herself.