P.J. HARVEY GOES BACK
TO BASICS AND FINDS MORE
New York Times
By Jon Pareles
In Polly Jeans Harvey's new songs, love is a monsoon, a tryst with the Devil, a sea to
drown in. That's when it's going well. When her lover is absent, as he is for most of the
songs, "this love becomes my torture/ this love my only crime." P.J. Harvey's
third album, "To Bring You My Love" (Island; CD and cassette), has nothing to
say about pop romance and everything to do with Romantic obsession. It presents love as a
purifying ordeal and a spiritual question, as both a state of grace and a fall from grace,
in songs delivered with the austere deliberation of the blues.
Love, faith, power, and terror have always been tangled in Harvey's songs, and "To
Bring You My Love" just knots them tighter. Her lyrics have left behind the modern
world for the terrain of the elements - deserts and rivers, wind and rain - and the sphere
of allegory and revelation. She doesn't separate sacred and earthly love; both are
cataclysmic.
In "To Bring You My Love" the singer prays to Jesus as she admits she's
"lain with the devil, cursed God above, forsaken heaven." In "Long Snake
Moan" as she vows to drown someone in her love, she pleads "Raise me up, Lord,
call me Lazarus." And when her lover finally arrives in the final song, "The
Dancer," he is "dressed in black with a cross bearing my name," and he
tells her "Touch the face of the true God."
Elsewhere, the woman in love becomes a desparate parent. In "C'mon Billy" the
singer begs her lover to meet his young son, her voice breaking as she remembers their
passion and faces his indifference now. In "Down by the Water," a relaxed
cha-cha with an ominous distorted bass line, something awful has happened to the singer's
daughter. It might be abduction, or incest, or murder; it leaves teh singer babbling,
"Little fish, big fish, swimmin' in the water, com back here, man, give me my
daughter."
With words like that, and with Harvey's voice - self-possessed or ardent or horrified,
sometimes tense to a raspy breaking point, sometimes inconsolable - there's no need for
sonic bombast. The music on "TBYML" is slow and stark. Harvey has disbanded the
trio (also called PJ Harvey) that she led on her first two albums, and she plays many of
the instruments on "TBYML". N ow that she is even more fully in charge, she has
moved her music farther from the extroversion of rock.
On the new album, she has renounced the odd meters and sudden guitar jolts of her older
songs; instead, she uses basic, measured vamps that repeat calmly and inexorably, as
disquieting as a fixed stare. She has learned, particularly from bluesmen like John Lee
Hooker, that a simple, unswerving riff can be adamant and desolate at the same time.
Harvey produced "TBYML" with John Parish, who plays drums and guitar, and
with Flood, who sculpted the eerie sounds of recent albums by U2, NIN, and Depeche Mode.
Harvey doesn't seek the arena-filling pomp of those bands. There are long stretches
without drums, or with a lone guitar line against Harvey's voice; that's how the album,
and the title song, begins. Still, the music isn't raw like the homemade demo versions of
Harvey's previous songs (which were released for both albums in England, only for ROM in
the US). While most of the music stays understated and intimate, every note seems
carefully placed.
The album isn't always quiet. "Meet Ze Monsta" and "Long Snake
Moan" use stomping drums and fuzz-toned guitars, shoring up lyrics that welcome love
as annihilation: "What a monster what a night/ what a lover what a fight." But
the arrangements stayed contained, nearly static, with the impact but not the exuberance
of more conventional rockers. And for most of the album, the music looks inward, conjuring
private enigmas with minimal backups.
In "Working for the Man" the singer may be a prostitute cruising in her car -
"take him handsome, take him mean/ look good in my steel machine" - or some kind
of roving Samaritan: "Going around I'm doing good/ get my strength from the man
above." Behind Harvey's muttered, distorted vocal, the music is claustrophobic funk:
just bass and drums for the first verse, adding steady maracas, a circular four-note
guitar line and a few notes of organ. It's "Heard It Through the Grapevine" as
imagined by Steve Reich.
"Teclo" is the one song that allows itself some grandeur. It begins with taps
on a bell; then Harvey sings above a two-chord guitar pattern, like something John Lee
Hooker might play. Piano and distorted guitar repeat Harvey's melody, and sustained sounds
begin to loom in the background; a thick-toned guitar, with a touch of Jimi Hendrix, joins
her on the chorus. "Teclo, your death will send me to my grave," she sings, and
soon she is begging, again and again, "Let me ride on his grace for a while."
Her voice starts with mournful dignity and grows ever more distraught; finally, she's
almost sobbing, "Let me ride on your grace for awhile." Is she addressing a
friend, a lover, a deity? When love runs so strong, the distinction no longer matters;
what's important is that the songs are willing to risk everything to feel it again.
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