PJ Harvey Is This Desire?

Back in ‘95 Polly Jean Harvey put aside the guitar that she’d been hiding her small frame behind and reinvented herself as a larger than life frontwoman in a blood-red dress for her third studio album Rid Of Me and the subsequent tour. She also abandoned the punkish blues and woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown intensity of her first two albums for a more refined sort of psychodrama and the dark techno textures of producers Flood and John Parish. Flood is back on Is This Desire? - you can hear his influence in the disc’s Achtung Baby - style abraded bass and drum tones - but so is Harvey’s guitar and the sense of impending hysteria that fuelled her first two albums. More than ever she brings to mind Nick Cave on the disc’s opening cut Angelene a disjointed picture of a woman who’s "the prettiest mess you ever seen" set against a bluesy backdrop. But it’s always been much harder with Harvey than with Cave to tell where the character acting ends and the soul bearing begins. So it’s just plain chilling to hear Harvey ranting like the lovechild of Patti Smith and Iggy Pop over Flood’s rushing techno beats on The Sky Lit Up, sketching a fractured portrait of suicide in the harsh and noisy My Beautiful Leah, and repeating a line like "I damn to hell every second you breathe" on an otherwise subdued tune like Catherine.

Matt Ashare

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