| John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey Spleen John Parish played on and coproduced last year's PJ Harvey album, To Bring You My Love, but the link goes back to a band of his called Automatic Dlamini that she played in years ago. Their present collaboration has Harvey writing words for Parish's music. Dance Hall differs from previous projects involving Harvey in key ways: first, the synthesizers and warmer tones of My Love are banished here in favor of a starker sound; second, Parish cultivates a minimal, blues-inflected style that separates this work from Harvey's aggressive, harder-edged investigations in the same genre. He often paces his numbers at a near crawl, lending them a sweaty, genuinely bluesy feel. Against this austere musical backdrop Harvey plays bruised chanteuse, offering up vocal performances that swing from the absurd to the sublime. The album's second song, "Rope Bridge Crossing," offers a brutal but accurate synopsis of the whole. It's a malevolent, snaky bit of blues that crosses muted acoustic strumming with creeping, dissonant lines of electric guitar. Harvey renders her lyrics with a gasping, dreamy drawl that perfectly complements Parish's stinging leads; "Crossing" is a bastard hybrid of Son House smoke and Birthday Party scream. Next up, "City of No Sun," constructed from voice and guitar alone, makes the previous (already streamlined) number seem lush by comparison; but Parish's raunchy backup playing and Harvey's shrill, emphatic wailing give this track the potency of a musical bludgeoning---and it's Harvey's best singing since Dry. "That Was My Veil" is an acoustic ballad, unsullied by the slightest trace of false sentiment. Once again, Harvey's voice, more dulcet and restrained than on the preceding track, is married to a lone guitar. Despite these simple materials, the result is a gripping emotional intensity. Spleen is a project by PJ Harvey band alumnus Rob Ellis. Harvey acts as vocalist on just a couple of tracks, providing either a banshee yelp or a tubercular rasp as needed. Ellis' record is more ambitious than Parish's flirting as it does with noise and ambient sound. But while Ellis covers a greater sonic territory than Parish, the results aren't always worth the risk. Spleen are always conceptually interesting; but some of the tracks seem poorly realized, little more than faux noir soundtracks. Still, this record could point to future work that may prove more fruitful than Parish's tighter but less provocative enterprise. --Phil Pegg |
