| John Parish & Polly Jean Harvey Nobody seems to have noticed this, but Dance Hall at Louse Point is a travelogue, with six different locales -- Bristol, Stockholm, the rural English county of Dorset, Tokyo, Washington and Modena, Italy -- duly noted in parentheses next to each song title, each song succinctly evoking a distinct mood. Written during P.J. Harvey's 1995 world tour, the album is a turbulent riptide into the psychic effects of displacement: Cities and touring and love overlap and entwine into the soundtrack of a young girl's first love and exposure to the world outside her small town. And as if there's any doubt of the autobiographical cast of the album, it's worth noting that Polly Harvey herself hails from Dorset and that her tour visited each of those cities. John Parish, a long-time musical companion of Harvey's, is a musician capable of making sound go to dizzying heights of passion, enabling Harvey to concentrate on writing only the lyrics. While Harvey's singing has a drunkenness of emotion that pushes this collection beyond typical lovelorn ditties, Parish's guitar is descriptive, almost verbal -- it predicts, explains, echoes and merges into Harvey's pain and melancholy, making this an even bleaker and more desperate record than last year's To Bring You My Love. The individual songs stand on their own but take on more meanings in context -- they build on each other as the record progresses, some segued so close that there is no separation, making Dance Hall at Louse Point a tangle of guitar, voice and lyrics supporting a composure that cannot stand alone. The album is really one long piece, each song a chapter in a tale of broken trust and heartache trauma. It's a diary of a young girl's emotional states as she tries to grasp love even as she circles the globe. (Indeed, this is such a theatrical work that it will tour Britain next year as a major contemporary dance piece choreographed by Mark Bruce.) It might only be the cities attributed to the songs, but the story brings to mind World War II -- the roaming, fluid melancholy of Bristol, hopelessness in Stockholm, anxious terror in Tokyo, secrets and sabotage from DC -- making Dance Hall at Louse Point a theatre in the military sense, too. But above all, it tells a compelling story of innocence lost, love lost and, eventually, joy found. Parish musically introduces the main character of this drama very calmly and sweetly with the brief guitar solo, "Girl" (Bristol). Girl is a young woman not yet tinged with the ugliness she is about to endure; as soon as she travels beyond Bristol and into the world, she's quickly thrown into the midst of love and lust. The half-whispered line from a remembered dream in the second track, "Rope Bridge Crossing" (Dorset) -- "I feel like music, you move me like music" -- sets the tone for the rest of the album, establishing the significance sound has to Harvey's emotional reality, underscoring how each city Girl visits brings with it an entirely new music and thus an entirely new emotion. Love is difficult for Girl. It consumes her. It provides very little solace; it is passionate, intense and fast-burning. She succumbs fully. Girl is far away from home in Tokyo, "City of No Sun," where desire has turned against her -- "city of no sun, no peace in my heart, left me nothing, left me broken... lover release me, I can't breathe, I can't live..." She wakes up in the ancient city of Modena, Italy, with the beautiful acoustic ballad "That Was My Veil," a sad and melancholy song which anyone who has loved and been betrayed will find themselves humming in their sleep. "Was she a pretty girl, does she have pretty hair, was she soft-spoken, was there a love there," Harvey asks wistfully. The Modena thread continues with "Urn with Dead Flowers in a Drained Pool," an earnest supplication set to whiplash dynamics. By mid-disc, melancholy turns to anguish, paranoia and desperation. In "Taut," Girl has landed in Washington, DC, a no-man's land which governs the New World and yet is a city with no soul. This is the end of Girl's ability to handle her situation, but rather than lashing out histrionically, she dissolves in quiet static and prayer: Parish's guitar is tense, percussive and dissonant as occasional drum accents build to the chorus, where Harvey whisper-sings of her fear, peaking with her poignant prayer for salvation: "Jesus save me." Girl recovers in the bracing northern air of Stockholm, where the world lingers for a moment with "Un Cercle Autour du Soleil." There, the sun doesn't set in the summer and time has a languid, liquid flow. Girl's ensuing return to Dorset (the tense, Zeppelinesque "Heela") is a return to love. But is this a return to her previous passion? A healing of past wounds? Harvey leaves this open to interpretation while the music slides with nary a hitch into a disappointingly straightforward cover of Peggy Lee's signature tune, "Is That All There Is?" Unlike the rest of Dance Hall at Louse Point, this is a song of no city, no place, no where. Now, Girl is world-weary; she's been through a full emotional wrenching and what's left is a somber, deadpan worldview. There isn't a trace of joy in Girl/Harvey's voice as she tells the story of her youth. So why doesn't she just end it all? Well, she's simply too bored to die. Back in Bristol with the title track, although she's renewed her energy, Girl is unnerved. She doesn't feel the peace she felt at the beginning of her tour. This thrashy instrumental blues describes better than words her emotional state -- it's discordant, swinging and jangly. It's a return to home with pieces missing or somewhat askew; Girl is shell-shocked. Then, finally, we wind up back in Japan with the minute-plus "Lost Fun Zone." There is anxiety and panic, desperation of belief: "I believe I'm here to stay/ I believe His son was sent to save... take me one more time..." Belief and self-denial are wrapped into one. Jesus saves -- but not this Girl. She is here to stay. |
