When we first found PJ Harvey, she was happy and bleeding, demanding in the same breath that we look at her ruby red lips and her work-strong arms. Five years on and not much has changed for Polly Jean. On her newest and most conflicted effort she asks, Is This Desire? It sounds as though Ms. Harvey doesn’t know the answer herself.
PJ Harvey
Showbox, Tuesday, October 20
She’s always been a little confused—split between the falling woman in the dancing costume of To Bring You My Love and the 50-Foot Queenie of Rid of Me who would make you lick her injuries while she screamed, “I’m on fire!” But in the past, Harvey’s two personae lived separate, if incomplete lives: one, a woman with her guitar and her strangled voice; the other, a woman with an operatic croon, but a strangled guitar replaced by a lush and dark synth forest.
Is This Desire? is the marriage of these two ladies—the man-sized spitfire and the one with the long snake moan. Stella Marie, the star, and Sheela Na-Gig, the butch exhibitionist, reside together comfortably: Techno-informed beats serve as the backdrop to Harvey’s familiar aggressive vocalizing, and shredded, distorted guitars propel aggravated whispers.
It’s an unsettling, beautiful mess—although it’s a combination more easily swallowed by dance-music fans than the rock devotees who were drawn to Harvey’s take-no-prisoners earlier works. It was the dance aficionados who liked To Bring You My Love, a disk that garnered criticism for overproduction and Harvey’s then-new glamorous image. In reality, Love was no slicker than Rid of Me, produced by indie stalwart Steve Albini, who crushed and mangled Harvey’s voice so that we could better hear the guitars—guitars also wrecked and ravaged so that we could better feel the pain.
Desire, produced by Flood, Harvey, and Head (the same folks who did Love), pits yin against yang for heightened effect. On “The Wind,” Harvey whispers, menacing and lurking behind an urgent but dimmed wall of guitars. And just when you expect the usual big, black monsoon to come bolting out of the barracks, Harvey unleashes a sexy, tripped-up trip-hop beat and some very ladylike vocals. It’s a stunner.
But Harvey hasn’t always been able to hold her balance; sometimes she just falls flat, arms empty. By turns masculine (Rid of Me) and feminine (Dry, Love), Harvey’s never felt comfortable in that tight, filthy dress. She’s always trying to silence her lady head; on “The Wind,” Harvey’s mysterious masculine character walks alongside her girly girl while she listens to the wind blow.
The same duality informs the entire disc, from the inside cover art that asks “lyrics handwritten or printed?”—and proceeds to present both—to the simultaneously romantic and unsentimental lyrics. Always one to work with images, usually disturbing ones, Harvey knows that dreamy, dreamy music makes it be all right, and proceeds with little caution, taking at her leisure whatever she can find: a broken heart; an oncoming storm; and somewhere, always, every time, there’s Mary. On Dry, Mary drinks it soft, and loses her head; on Love, Mary’s a ghost, alluded to in a record full of gardens with trouble lurking, rivers flowing, and fiery desire. Harvey carefully mends her metaphors—she’s “Angeline, the prettiest mess you’ve ever seen” (on “Angeline”)—and builds songs that are subtly disturbing and comforting at the same time.
A true tortured artiste, Harvey can wail and moan, screech and scream things like “How much more can you take from me!” without sounding like a whiny, self-indulgent brat. While you wait for Harvey to clear the shit out of her eye so that we might see her better, she throws out a line, a hook, and baits us. And just when you think you’ve got it all figured out—as on the sublime “The Garden”—well, Harvey pulls the rug out from under you. After all, it’s no sweat, she’s clean, nothing can touch her. Harvey was king of the world long before James Cameron was. Fifty inches long, she makes you queen of everything, but she still lets us know: We’re not rid of her.
