Don’t look here for the answer

Is This Desire?, PJ Harvey’s fifth album, is the product of a pop scene more used to promoting appetite that questioning it. But such singularity has characterised Polly Jean Harvey’s musical career to date: whether producing stubbornly uncommercial music or indulging in wild changes of image, she has constantly sought to defy her audience’s expectations.

In this , if nothing else, the contemporary she most resembles Is Bjork. Both have achieved success without tailoring their work in sole pursuit of that goal; both, too, have seen such wilfulness caricatured as eccentricity or worse. But whereas Bjork took her cue from dance music, PJ Harvey has concentrated herself within more traditional, guitar-based parameters. here she has sparked comparisons with Patti Smith, the 1970’s doyenne of the New Wave singer-songwriters: sharing Smith’s vocal style and musical intensity, Harvey is not shamed by the likeness.

Harvey’s previous album, To Bring You My Love, saw her exploring themes and styles that owed much to another influence, Nick Cave. Calming the squalls of noise that had battered previous releases, Harvey crafted and updated version of the blues that was always latent within her music.

In the three years since, Harvey has kept busy with collaborations and other projects. It seems apt, nonetheless, that after such a gestation period, her new release should find itself torn between developing the work of its predecessor and deviating from its path entirely.

Is This Desire? presents some of Harvey’s most accessible songs so far; but it also explores sonic extremes that will test even the most stalwart of her supporters. When not seducing the listeners, it seems hell-bent on testing them.

Songs that bark back to To Bring You My Love soothe that album’s more abrasive edges. The acoustic guitar predominates as much as its electric sibling; organ and piano are pushed to greater prominence. Rhythmic and harmonic, songs such as ‘Is This Desire?’ and ‘The River’ are as beguiling as any Harvey has recorded.

Yet interspersed with these are songs that allow for no such familiar listening. Guitars are distorted out of shape (‘My Beautiful Leah’); elements of jazz creep in (‘The Garden’). ‘Joy’ is the most extreme example: a cacophonous, clanking discordance over which Harvey bellows almost paradoxically dour lyrics, this is a song that teeters on the edge of the unlistenable.

Generally, though the effect is more discomfiting than discouraging. The apparent musical inconsistency is also given some grounding by a lyrical viewpoint that never stands still. Although a cast of women people these songs (‘Angelene’), ‘A Perfect Day Elise’, Catherine’).

Harvey’s focus slides constantly between desirer and desired, first and third person female and male.

Unsettling the listener, both lyrically and musically, Is This Desire? does not provide any answers to its self-posed question. The album does however reaffirm PJ Harvey as one of the more challenging and bemusing presence’s in Contemporary pop music: hers is a catchiness that snags. Is This Desire? may not leave listeners wholly satisfied, but it should leave them wanting more.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney