The term 'singer songwriter' tends to be applied to a lot of dull, acoustic-only artists of very dubious talent who are largely indistinguishable from each other, apart from that some of them are men and some of them are women.

P J Harvey is not like that. It's tempting to describe her music, her earlier stuff in particular, as a cross between Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and Sonic Youth. It doesn't really sound like that, but it's certain that it takes talent to sound as disturbing as she can with just her voice and a guitar. Her music is at once screamy and noisy, bluesy, and hushed and quiet.
 

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Stories From the City Stories From the Sea (2000, Island)
P J Harvey; always different, yet always somehow the same. That's what John Peel said about the Fall, but the point's the same. All of Polly Jean's records sound similar; kinda grungey, kinda country, kinda folky-bluesy. Generally the difference is how much screaming/groaning they have on them. This doesn't have very much. In fact it's almost poppy, and for this it seems America have taken Polly to their little capitalist hearts. But she's no Shaina Twain or Alanis Morisette. The singles (the first three tracks, more or less) are actually pretty damn good, as well as having that 'depth' thing. They also sound better on the album than on the radio, as is usually the case.

I don't think I'm wrong in saying that the P J Harvey musical progression is from 'really fucking angry feminist' to 'vaguely happy but somehow melancholy'. Unusually, this isn't a bad thing. Polly Jean still has as much to write about as ever; it's true there's a lot between 'Rid of Me' and 'Good Fortune' or 'This Is Love'. But Polly Jean manages to make being happy sound unusually exciting.

The album's centre is 'This Mess We're In', an eerie duet with P J Harvey's male equivalent, Thom Yorke; probably the only vocalist around in Britain who could match up to Polly in the Christ-how-they-hell-do-they-do-that-with-their-voice field. 'The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore' is best described as 'more angry', but like much of the rest of the album its genius is in its layers; the production of the record is best described as dense, without sounding muffled. While the songs themselves might be relatively simple, the production on many tracks give them complexity and depth. And makes them kinda interesting. However, tracks like 'Beautiful Feeling' strip down the music to just Polly, a guitar and backing vocals, creating a kind of intimacy, and yet sounding every bit as 'deep' as the more layered tracks.

To me, this is the classic story of an 'indie' artist making a record accessible to the mainstream; the Delgados did it with 'The Great Eastern', the Flaming Lips did it with 'The Soft Bulletin'. Like both of these records, '...Stories' manages to be both accessible and, you know, good. I hope it brings more people to the P J Harvey fold, like those other two albums did for the Delgados and 'Lips. This is maybe not as pissed off as her earlier stuff, but this is still Polly Jean as her best. It's got a really nice cover too.

#LINKS#
P J Harvey Official
Jolly good site, this. Kinda sexy, as well. I'm not sure how that's relevant, but I thought I'd write it anyway.
 
 

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