| PJ Harvey A couple of times in every rocker generation--that's roughly every two or three years--somebody blows the lid off everybody's expectations and renews the possibilities of the idiom's lengthening history. This time, it's Polly Harvey and her fierce, feisty, voluptuous rhythm section, bassist Steven Vaughan and drummer Rob Ellis. Between last year's Dry and their new album, Rid of Me (both Indigo/Island), PJ Harvey is resynthesizing--and in the process reimagining and redefining--the sound and shape of rock and roll. Just cock an ear toward her burned-rubber take on Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" for a sample dose of how. Twenty-three-year-old Polly has all the ingredients of the perfect postpunk rocker. She's got attitude: She's pissed-off, direct, articulate to the compacted point of imagist poetry, ironic, sarcastic and as bracing as salt sprayed into a wound with a fire hose. Listen, for example, when she sings, "I'm coming out man-size/ Skinned alive/I want to fit/Got to get/ Man-size. . . . /I measure time/I measure height/I calculate/My birthright" through clenched teeth without dropping a single scooped note or melisma. She's also got the musical chops and smarts that mark her off from the pack: Catch the subtlety of her intricate backing-guitar figures on "Missed" or the flat-out way she wails a banshee solo on "50 Foot Queenie." Rock is, perhaps above all, about two things: beat and sound. As for the first, this trio insinuates rhythms with a ferocious, walloping openness rare in any format, let alone rock. Like Trane's groups with Elvin Jones or Hendrix's with Mitch Mitchell, PJ Harvey doesn't usually lean or land on beats in any straightforward way. Instead, the group surrounds them until they pulsate, loom ever larger, become unavoidably definitive like the hole in the proverbial doughnut. Even when all the parts the group is gyring around sound simple they're not. During the first chorus of "Missed" for instance, the band seamlessly drops half a bar in the midst of a sonic hurricane, and effortlessly, misleadingly (you'll find your foot tapping in the "wrong" place when the verse begins), turns the beat around with the panache of all those blues players young Polly grew up listening to. (Her parents, avid blues, folk and rock fans, are also promoters in England.) What's maybe as telling is that they resist the temptation to repeat that move or any other. It's the kind of classic economy of means that speaks volumes by implying just how many more moves they've got. Their reveling in their own fertility bursts through everywhere on Rid of Me. The odd-meter patchwork of "Missed"; the barbed-wire licks and yodeling moans and Velvet Undergroundish violin-as-rude-noise running through "Legs"; the chunky-skidding-bass-and-chord-plus-intermittent-drum-slamdunks intro to "Rub 'Til It Bleeds," and the chorus's punctuation by feedback that builds from wisps to a full-throated bellow; the buzz-saw guitar figures spiraling up from the drummer's offbeats on "Hook"--you get the idea. And they can do it all live with a vengeance, as they proved every time I saw them during last year's two brief swings through the United States. On stage or on disc, the band doesn't miss a trick or a step. The million or so little touches, dabs of color and expressive rage or pain or sarcasm or humor, the musical twists and lurches and sidesteps that are the building blocks of their arrangements, showcase a fabulous inventiveness and a precision-tooled interaction. But all that obviously well-honed grace never betrays the kick of the music's aggressive rock slop. That's true even when Polly's singing "Man-size" in front of a string sextet that sounds like it's landing somewhere between late Beethoven and Bartok. So let's put it this way: PJ Harvey is to garage bands what heavy water is to H2O. As for its overall sound on disc, Rid of Me, like Dry, is what you might call radical-conservative. Despite the fact that the first album was recorded for a couple thousand pounds--a pittance, in studio terms--and the second had a bigger budget, the group clearly plots an aural continuum. Along with their postpunk blurring of the normal mainstream rock distinctions--between vocals and instruments, frontline and backline--they inhabit a postdigital wall-of-grunge mix that's as filthy as a wrecked 78 and as precise as a laser. The sonic blear with its points of light deliberately echoes everything from the tautly driving postwar urban blues of Muddy Waters to the Sex Pistols' tortured, tortuous unintelligibility. With producer Steve Albini, a hardcore veteran, on board for Rid of Me, the trio laces their slash-and-burn attack with a lattice of quotes and references at least as intense as on Dry. Maybe only somebody who's been absorbing the music's history since birth the way a Ferrari gulps high octane could pull off so unselfconscious and effective and distinctive an effort. Distant fade-ins, sudden dramatic shifts in decibel levels, odd creaks and rumbles and billows of feedback and vocals feathering off at the edges of the dense, almost impacted, but still three-dimensional sonic imaging the results are as visceral and immediate as a stomach pump. And Polly's lyrics are ferociously scarifying, funny, polymorphously perverse and metamorphically metaphoric as they survey and X-ray the scar tissue that covers human psyches and relationships. For a 23-year-old-for a 123-year-old-Polly Harvey has a frightening grasp of the daunting and harrowing complexity beating at the heart of human emotion. As they've been for Elvis Costello, contradictions are her meat, and she likes serving them up raw and bloody. On the title cut, there's a look at the kind of atavistic ferocity that surfaces as a relationship peters out: "I beg you/My darling/Don't leave me/I'm hurting. . . ./I'll tie your legs/Keep you against my chest/'Cause you're not rid of me/Yeah, you're not rid of me/I'll make you lick my injuries ... /Till you say don't you wish you never never met her." There's the way "Missed" unfolds as a poetic thriller with homicidal results, brandishing the refrain, "No, I miss him." There's the stunning way "Legs" opens: "Ah-ah-ah/Did I tell you you're divine?/Uh-oh did I ever/When you were alive?" There's the vicious emotional truth in the way it closes: "I might as well be dead/But I could kill you instead." There's the savagely ironic pivot by the narrator of "Rub 'Til It Bleeds": "God's truth/I'm not lying" is how the verse finishes over a gently strummed accompaniment, which swells and pumps into the angry chorus that turns to crow, "And you/And you believed me." And, of course, there are the song titles themselves, things like "Me-Jane" and "Snake," the story of Eden from Eve's point of view. Even more than Chrissie Hynde's, Harvey's perspective translatesconsistently into metaphors and symbols that are uniquely female--one of many things that could help make her a revolutionary figure in what looks more and more like rock's latter days. (Either of her albums would be a hip-hopper's delight of samples.) She never lets you forget she's a woman, either. That's not because she's waving around some outsize rocker's ego or feminist posturing: Shy in person, she's in command on stage but undramatically, understatedly. The power of her presence doesn't derive from flashy moves and costumes; it's the sheer irradiating force of her personality as the music represents it. This woman is no mouthpiece with a microphone singing one more time about the ache of being left behind. She's created a world that she dares you to enter while she's brandishing her volatile guitar and supple voice and poetic talents and dynamic leadership on every tune she cuts. So it's her blood all over the tracks that I find myself playing over and over and over again. Author: Gene Santoro |
