| PJ Harvey PJ Harvey has struck gold again, with a new album, To Bring You My Love. As you'd expect from installments one and two in the turbulent, unpredictable psychodramas that are PJ Harvey's stock in trade, nothing here is as straight-forward as it seems. Take the title track. A raunchy guitar lick adapted from Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign" is wreathed by a nearfeedback drone, then yields to recurrent organ-plus-overdriven-guitar explosions punctuating a chord progression from Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy." Meanwhile, the lyrics, delivered in a voice that ranges from throaty grunge to ululating whoops, tumble Rosemary's Baby and the woman-as-witch trope in with John Bunyanesque rhetoric and the bluesman-meets-Satan-at-the-crossroads tradition. The volatile results turn the mix's ingredients 180 degrees: "I was born in the desert/Been down for years/Jesus come closer/I think my time is near/I've traveled over/Dry earth and floods/Falling high water/To bring you my love/Climbed over mountains/ Traveled the sea/Cast out of heaven/Cast down on my knees/I've lain with the Devil/Cursed God above/ Forsaken heaven/To bring you my love." In case you miss what's happening, the next track, a furious sonic squall called "Meet Ze Monsta," exemplifies Harvey's bent for retelling fables from the female alleged victim's viewpoint, thus pulling them inside out: Fay Wray, as we all probably guessed or hoped, had what sounds like a pretty great time with Kong after all. In effect, To Bring You My Love is Polly Jean's first solo disc: She plays most of the instruments, does all the vocals and is the dominant element here even more clearly than on Dry or Rid of Me (both Island), which were obviously her auteurial products [see Santoro, "Music," May 24, 1993]. On the down side, that translates into less varied rhythms than her crackerjack ex-trio mates fed into the creative musical storm. But PJ Harvey's also got such a deep bag of let's-get-this-music-physical ideas that that's less crucial than it might be. "Monsta," for instance, grinds out a techno-industrial feel beneath its oozing guitar spew. An almost subdued tune, "Working for the Man," matches technostyle organ bass with swamp-tremolo rhythm guitar and the eerie, disconcerting double-tracked octave vocals Harvey is so fond of using to create an off-balance sonic depth. "Long Snake Moan," continuing the bluesman-image reappropriation (the title, complete with sexual puns, is adapted from blues great Blind Lemon Jefferson's classic "That Black Snake Moan"), takes its gale-force cues from breakthroughs like Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" and "Voodoo Chile"--and in fact, it rides out to the fade asking, "Is my voodoo working?" PJ Harvey comes to the States on tour from mid-May through June. Be there, and bring your own mojo. Author: Gene Santoro |
