Dry (1992)

PJ Harvey has convincingly taken on many compelling forms and styles of songwriting throughout her career, but when she originally emerged back in the early nineties she was a singer of pure, urgent power and raw, almost demonic sexuality, and this period produced lots of the music for which she is most fondly remembered. Dry, her debut album and released on the London indie imprint Too Pure, made Polly Jean an instant superstar on the sparsely populated British indie circuit in 1992, a refreshing reflection of (and antidote to) the male-dominated grunge that was emanating from America.

A lacerating, literate portrait of the darker side of the female psyche, as violent as it is beautiful, Dry didn’t really fit any of the pre-existing rock ideals of the early ‘90s, melding addictive hooks with brute power and playing an ambiguous and intriguing character within its 11 tracks. She sometimes seems to write from the perspective of the ‘willing victim’ to subvert and attack expectations of women in relationships and society (the indie classic ‘Dress’, the skronking strings and acoustic beauty of ‘Plants And Rags’); on other occasions, she plays her characters with self-assured confidence (“going to take my hips to a man who cares” in ‘Sheela-Na-Gig’, the vengeful ‘Hair’).

Harvey’s distinctive voice is at once haunted yet raw and taunting, capable of a great range of expression. Through it, she takes ownership of the trials and tribulations that face young women, skewering double standards and pairing the wounded cries of her voice with the punk-rock aggression of her guitar and general performance. The pummelling, rattling rhythms from Rob Ellis on drums and Steve Vaughn on bass make Dry seem like an exercise in controlled fury.

The tense expectancy of ‘Happy And Bleeding’ sees its protagonist lose her virginity, telling the story in an ambivalent way. Using images of nature and fruit, she is both “long overdue” and “too early”. Playing so cleverly and subversively with images of female cultural symbols and signifiers became a trademark of early PJ works, and it this that forces the listener to confront what they’re feeling and why they’re feeling it, making Dry an often uncomfortable yet valuable experience, as discussed in Laura Snapes’ excellent 2016 retrospective on the record.

There are few other examples of ‘90s debut albums so instantly establishing the mythology and reputation of an individual artist than Dry. Here, ready-made, was a brilliant, distinctive and forward-thinking British female icon in a musical decade that would sadly become associated with the retrograde chauvinism of the vast majority of Britpop. Incredibly, there was even better to come very quickly… (9/10) (LISTEN)

Rid Of Me (1993)

You can instantly understand everything about Rid Of Me from its cover artwork. Topless, tossing her jet-black hair wildly to the side while making a sexual, smouldering but also deeply unsettling gaze to the camera, Polly Jean was prepared to lay everything bare on her second album, released a mere 13 months after Dry and now with the benefit of a major label deal with Island. The taut, explosive dynamics on that record now found the perfect musical foil in the shape of legendary producer Steve Albini, who would record Nirvana’s In Utero later the same year on the back of Kurt Cobain hearing this record.

Essentially, Rid Of Me doubles down on everything that made PJ Harvey’s debut so great. Love, lust, violent anger and the thin lines that separate each are the themes amid basic, percussive production that suits material which evokes the stark intimacy of a live performance in some sweaty, cramped rock dive. PJ’s guitars buzz and distort more, almost animalised through Albini’s compression; Vaughn’s bass reverberates ever deeper; and Ellis’ drums have even more cavernous and powerful.

The hoarse shrieks of “lick my legs / I’m on fire!” of the caustic opening title track make it one of the most memorable moments of her repertoire. Albini’s excoriating, low-end production vaults from preternatural, obsessive quiet to stunningly loud with astonishing force, while Harvey pours out revenge fantasies that border on the psychotic from her wounded soul.

From this amazing opening salvo, PJ Harvey and her musicians take the alarmed listener through jet-force blues, post-punk so angular and atonal that it borders on the no-wave of early Swans via an intuitive, explosive performance style that sounds like bottled lightning. The scattershot racket of ‘50ft. Queenie’, the male-baiting ‘Man-Size’ and bone-rattling ‘Rub It ‘Til It Bleeds’ are only the most breathtaking moments in an album of performance artistry, into which Harvey puts every single piece of her heart and soul.

Smouldering and smoking with fire and brimstone, Rid Of Me is indisputably one of the ‘90s most purely abrasive sonic achievements. It takes the uninitiated listener so totally by surprise, but it’s so compelling and rewarding for further visits that it will simply never leave your conscience. In terms of her career arc, it was the first of three undisputed masterpieces of PJ Harvey’s catalogue. (10/10) (LISTEN)

To Bring You My Love (1995)

As if all the anger had suddenly blown itself out, PJ Harvey’s third album was dramatically different to its two predecessors. Dissembling the ‘PJ Harvey Trio’ and performing under her own name for the first time, with a bigger backing band including John Parish and Mick Harvey, who would become two of her most trusted collaborators in the years to come, To Bring You My Love was the start of a new era in terms of music as well as songwriting.

This time, instead of the unflinching and detailed honesty of Rid Of Me, PJ Harvey seemed to deal in sweeping emotions, grand gestures and broad brushstrokes over an expanded range of songcraft. The trick to the cohesion of To Bring You My Love was that the music was generous and brightly produced, yet kept quite rhythmically simplistic, meaning her songwriting and passionate, almost mono-maniacal vocal delivery (check out the ecstatic exclamations on ‘The Dancer’) was even further to the fore. As such, it proved Harvey to be a talent up there with the likes of Nick Cave and Tom Waits.

The stripped-back opening title track, built almost entirely on her sparsely strummed, low-end guitar that eventually rages with passion, is typical of the dimensional shift in her work, as do the strident, bold and clean acoustic guitar slashes of ‘C’mon Billy’ and the folky shuffle of the unabashed romanticism in ‘Send His Love To Me’. The blood-chilling infanticide tale ‘Down By The Water’, amazingly selected for the record’s first single and an MTV hit, saw her experiment with electronics and organs for the first time.

On ‘Working For The Man’, guided by spectral guitar and sonorous bass rumbles, Harvey’s voice barely registers above a mutter, and it’s exactly this kind of wintry ambience that would come to dominate her work over the coming years. The shimmering ‘Teclo’ sees her pull off the same trick, as does the incredible ‘I Think I’m A Mother’. The old, harder dynamics were present on tracks like ‘Meet Ze Monsta’, or the punishing, almost Zeppelin-esque blues riffing of ‘Long Snake Moan’, Harvey displaying a voracious sexual appetite associated with her first two albums.

To Bring You My Love always seems to be undervalued in most discussions of her work, but it is represents a critical stage in her artistic evolution as well being a wonderful and stylistically diverse record in its own right. Nominated for the 1995 Mercury Music Prize (just like Rid Of Me had been in 1993), it showcased a very different, folkloric side to PJ Harvey and demonstrated her to be capable of great variety. (9/10) (LISTEN)

Is This Desire? (1998)

The result of a self-imposed musical exile in her hometown of Yeovil lasting nearly two years, during which she released Dance Hall At Louse Point collaboration with John Parish and appeared on a Nick Cave album, Is This Desire? eventually emerged a little unsure of its own identity, as reflected in the question mark in the title and the hushed, restrained ambience of virtually the entire record.

Essentially, it saw Harvey try to get back in touch with rural themes and her West Country roots, the music and translate those influences via modern instrumentation into something new. Partially it works, but sometimes it falls down. Right from the ethereal opener ‘Angelene’, it bears all the hallmarks of the kinds of classic records written in isolation (Pink Moon, Nebraska, etc.) – understated, introspective, taking repeated to listens to parse and understand.

Harvey whispers and croons secretively through the electrified folk nocturne ‘The Wind’, a track so quiet you basically need to listen to it in perfect silence. The same goes for the thematically similar ‘Catherine’ and ‘Electric Light’, the accompaniment for the latter is simply a deep, rumbling organ bass riff. ‘The Garden’ is spectacularly beautiful, buried in the second half of the album. Only the thumbnail sketch ‘The Sky Lit Up’ and the rumbling, shuddering rhythm of ‘A Perfect Day Elise’, a discography highlight for hardcore Harvey fans, stand apart.

Ultimately, the reason why Is This Desire? is often regarded as inferior to its predecessors is that the songs that don’t work feel a little underwritten. It’s a record that doesn’t give the listener any quarter, demanding to be accepted on its own terms, unlike the forcefulness of Rid Of Me or the sweeping production of To Bring You My Love.

Some fans regularly defends its merits – and rightly so, for it is certainly not a bad record by any stretch of the imagination – but for us, Is This Desire? is one of very few PJ Harvey records that isn’t brilliant, but merely decent. (6/10) (LISTEN)

Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea (2000)

Now this was more like it! PJ Harvey’s fifth studio album, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, finally delivered her the mainstream attention that she had so richly deserved for almost a decade by this point, selling 300,000 copies, earning her multiple BRIT and Grammy nominations, and becoming the first of two Mercury Music Prize victories in her illustrious career.

What can best be described as a concept album about love and lust, it was a noticeably more widescreen and slickly produced affair than her previous records, with established producer Mick Harvey tasked with giving the record a “rounder and fuller sound”. Following the traditional English imagery of her last two records, Stories… is PJ’s New York epic, harnessing the punk poetry of Patti Smith and the nervous energy of Television’s urban nocturnes, creating something emotionally intense yet stylish and effortless.

A big melodic breakout characterised by the soaring, sonorous single ‘Good Fortune’, Harvey sounded happier than ever before, but even that sense of joy led her down some pretty dark avenues. The dangerous, full-blooded passion of ‘Big Exit’ or the violent horniness of ‘This Is Love’ (a definitive statement compared to the unsure ‘Is This Desire?’ two years before), for example, were as glamorous as all hell. However, the influence of New York’s darker, seedy underbelly could be heard in ‘The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore’.

In other places, delicacy achieved the same ends, with the preternaturally hushed ‘Beautiful Feeling’ sounded like it would disintegrate if you breathed too loudly while listening to it, while ‘A Place Called Home’ and ‘We Float’ benefitted from sparse, crystalline production that brought out their beautiful, hidden depths. Every single track was a resounding success, revealing new depths to an artist who was intent on not only altering people’s preconceptions about her, but also on emulating and exceeding her own previous artistic achievements, and she did so with such consummate ease it was scary.

Post-9/11, Harvey’s reminiscences of love on New York’s streets took on a new sense of dread, with the Thom Yorke duet ‘This Mess We’re In’ containing lyrics like “we’re in New York / no need for words now / we sit in silence” that were impossible to hear in the same way again. Winning the Mercury Music Prize at a canter, with PJ memorably accepting the prize via phonelink as she watched the Pentagon ablaze from her Washington D.C. hotel window on September 11^th, it came to define her career for many years to come. It also helped female rock stars develop and experiment with their sexual personae and be taken seriously. (10/10) (LISTEN)

Uh Huh Her (2004)

The only other PJ Harvey album that isn’t brilliant or at least very, very good, 2004’s Uh Huh Her failed to spark the same kind of crossover mainstream interest that Stories From The City… had done four years before it. At best merely inconsistent, at worst a series of underdeveloped song sketches that might have benefitted from cleaner production, Harvey got behind the production desk herself for the first time, and playing all the instruments herself except the final drum tracks, Uh Huh Her seemed to want to strike a balance between the welcoming ambience of Stories… and a dissonant, back-to-basics approach like Rid Of Me, and trying to escape the sound of her previous albums by making something that sounded spontaneous, rough and ready.

“I was looking for distressed, debased sounds,” she told Tracks magazine at the time. “So all of the guitars are either tuned so low that it’s hard to detect what notes they’re playing or they’re baritone guitars or they’re played through the shittiest amps I could find.” While this was thrilling when it worked, it led in practice to a dramatically mixed bag of good ideas half-realised, minor career highlights and completely flat moments that feel like they’ve been brain-dumped onto the record.

The brooding, smouldering opener ‘The Life & Death Of Mr. Badmouth’ begins a comparatively strong opening half. ‘The Letter’ was an impressively off-kilter choice for lead single, with the stark, vulnerable ‘You Come Through’ and the rattling ‘Shame’ following it out of the traps as promo material for the album. The subdued, folky feel of ‘Pocket Knife’ is perhaps the most interesting moment, Harvey seemingly taking on the persona of a woman on her wedding day having second thoughts, with lyrics like “I’m not trying to cause a fuss / I just wanna make my own fuck-ups.”

But there are a number of moments, particularly in the back end of the record, that cause Uh Huh Her to trail off rather noticeably. The noisy, directionless ‘Who The Fuck?’, a sub-two minute snarl accompanied with scrungey guitar, is rather symptomatic of the downsides of Harvey’s chosen aesthetic, as is the shoulder-shrug interlude of ‘No Child Of Mine’ or the monotonous ‘Cat On The Wall’. Only ‘The Slow Drug’ was genuinely different to anything Harvey had done before, narcotic and sleepy electronics accompanying Harvey’s internal monologue.

Her voice flits instantaneously from intimacy to anger, but the songs themselves are sometimes not strong enough to hold the listener’s attention, something not helped by the very deliberately skeletal production. Not a bad album by any means, but PJ Harvey’s catalogue is replete with examples in which she sets the bar extremely high: Uh Huh Her is certainly the least impressive effort in her discography in this regard. (5/10) (LISTEN)

White Chalk (2007)

For her seventh album and with something of a creative rut to break out of, PJ Harvey ditched the drum/bass/guitar band format to compose an album of songs written for the piano. This was despite her almost total lack of familiarity with it – like a true innovator she is, she told The Wire “the great thing about learning a new instrument from scratch is that it liberates your imagination”.

White Chalk was utterly different to anything she’d done before: loosely grounded in British folk and the kind of gothic pop mastered by Kate Bush, it was a funereal, hopeless and quiet record that sounded like it had been recorded at the dead of night. Harvey’s vocals haunted the mix, in a much higher register than normal, pitched somewhere between wailing and whimpering. Recorded over five months with her old producer Flood and collaborator John Parish, these songs sound like the product of a cloistered existence, as if they were captured on tape as Harvey communed with dark spirits via a Ouija board – the witchy incantations of ‘Grow Grow Grow’ being the most obvious moment.

Aside from the creepy, plucked banjo sounds on the title track, there is no guitar at all. White Chalk was released in 2007, but its traditional English folk music cues and chilly production meant it could have been as old as time itself. Using curious lyrical mechanisms that could have come from one of the Brontë sisters (“Come here at once! All my being is now in pining” – ‘The Devil’), Harvey seems to transform the pain, isolation and fear of these songs into physical entities, worries made flesh by the product of a stressed, isolated mind in the dead of night with sleep proving elusive.

Perhaps the closest relation to White Chalk in her catalogue at this point was To Bring You My Love – another extremely literate record based on frail, occasionally possessed personas and which was partly rooted in folkloric traditions. The hopeless terror of closer ‘The Mountain’ or the grieving ‘Before Departure’ could easily have slotted in on that record if they had been rendered on guitar rather than piano. The hallucinations of ‘When Under Ether’ suggests at a brief respite from all this, but Harvey’s troubles still haunt her even in an altered state.

At just 33 minutes long, White Chalk had the effect of a fleeting fever dream, and it helped inform the next phase of her artistic development. It’s also the darkest PJ Harvey album ever made, which, considering she’s also sung about brutal warfare, dismembering her lover and drowning her daughter, is pretty impressive. However, although it would give Marilyn Manson nightmares, it’s also one of her most striking and beautiful. (9/10) (LISTEN)

Let England Shake (2011)

The third of Harvey’s three career-defining masterpieces thusfar, Let England Shake was named in 2014 as The Student Playlist’s greatest album of the decade so far – and nearly three-quarters of the way through the 2010s, there’s been little to suggest it might be toppled. It is rare that an album so clearly captures a mindset, or a sense of dread about the future, and able to sound political without sounding ham-fisted, overwrought or naff. But it was said by NME at the time that Let England Shake is ‘the war album’, in the same way that Ernest Hemingway wrote ‘the war novel’ or Francis Ford Coppola directed ‘the war movie’.

Harvey unmistakably engages with its chosen subject while rarely addressing it head on. When she does, Let England Shake still manages to avoid falling into the obvious pitfalls of sounding over-zealous or preachy, or worse still, like Bob Geldof. Subtlety was the aim here, not sloganeering, and together these 12 songs are sonically gentle yet emotionally forceful. Through it, she produced an eye-opening alternative treatise on national identity, on what being ‘English’ actually means – a country founded on empire, war and death.

In an unusual subversion of her regular writing process, Harvey completed all of the lyrics for Let England Shake before setting them to music. On the majority of the tracks she plays an autoharp. It was written over two and a half years and then recorded during a five-week stint at a church in her native Dorset. The vocal style on the album is different to the distinctive snarl on most of the rest of her back catalogue, but is a natural outgrowth of the haunting high registers of White Chalk: she coos and chants the words, leaving the listener the mental space in which to envisage the subject matter by themselves. Those words are set to faintly uneasy, atmospheric yet minimalist music that leaves you with the undefinable feeling of a world going wrong.

Consequently the entire package has a ‘state of the nation address’ feel to it. The creeping unease of the deceptively upbeat opening title track is confirmed by the words “England’s dancing days are done…”. Her performance of this title track on the Andrew Marr Show, in front of a visibly uncomfortable Gordon Brown, was quite something to behold

‘The Glorious Land’s bone-rattling drums are juxtaposed against a naive-sounding melody. Best of all is the taunting, accusatory ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’, with its haunting imagery (“saw soldiers fall like lumps of meat, arms and legs stuck in the trees”) and its sarcastic kiss-off line “what if I take my problem to the United Nations?”. This is the one occasion where Harvey abandons subtlety for directness, and it works spectacularly.

Let England Shake won plenty of accolades and critical praise upon its release, including the Mercury Music Prize – making her the only artist in history to have won it twice – and Ivor Novello Awards in addition to a BRIT Award nomination for Best Album. On top of this, 16 separate publications listed it as ‘album of the year’ in 2011, which cumulatively raised PJ Harvey’s profile to unprecedented levels. The rest of her back catalogue is an utter joy to explore, but this album may remain her undisputed career highlight as one of the most profound, serious and enduringly relevant artistic works of the 21^st century. (10/10) (LISTEN)

The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)

Taking more than five years to arrive following the huge critical and commercial success of Let England Shake, what Polly Jean Harvey eventually came up with was arguably the most interesting record of her astonishing career spanning nearly a quarter of a century. Inspired by visits to war-torn locations such as Kosovo that had been subject to foreign intervention, and from seeing inner-city deprivation in Washington D.C., The Hope Six Demolition Project’s unusual title came from a government initiative which, according to Harvey:

“[was] where run-down public housing in areas with high crime rates has been demolished to make room for better housing, but with the effect that many previous residents could no longer afford to live there, leading to claims of social cleansing.”

In effect, it was ‘Let America Shake’, as Pitchfork’s Laura Snapes coined it, focussing on the enduring concept of American exceptionalism and its consequences for the real world and real people. Musically, it saw her rediscover her latest talent for blues and American roots music while keeping the skeletal forms of her previous album, making for an intriguing mixture of influences. The gritty one-note blues riff of ‘The Ministry Of Defence’, the folk/garage-rock compound of ‘The Wheel’, and the blaring dissonant tones of ‘The Ministry Of Social Affairs’ made for, on the surface, a more diverse experience.

The taunting, accusatory nature of the lyrics remained the same, but Harvey came in for criticism from some quarters for merely pointing out problems and not offering any solutions, raising the question of culpability and experience tourism – particularly on opening track ‘The Community Of Hope’. Certainly, Harvey’s punches didn’t quite connect as regularly as on Let England Shake, and there was a certain journalistic distance in her standpoint as she made her observations, but it offered the listener the space to draw conclusions for themselves.

So what we were left with was an ambiguous record that didn’t always say what it wanted to, but failed to do it entertainingly. Even barring the odd flat track like ‘Near The Memorials To Vietnam And Lincoln’, there was plenty of thought-provoking and challenging material on display that made TH6DP a worthy instalment to a brilliant catalogue. (8/10) (LISTEN)