Spin Album Reviews
Polly Harvey takes for granted that eroticism hurts, that nothing pretty comes of giving oneself over to instinctive love. Since rock'n'roll is both the object and the language of her passion, her version makes for no easy listen, but its torturous turns accomplish the rare task of uncovering a new center for the music. She knows that rock not only expresses but stimulates desire, and if you're hungry enough, it can (at least momentarily) break you apart. That's how Harvey uses it-to free the man in her, and the madwoman, the machine and the animal, the goddess and the ghost. While most of her peers graze pop culture's surfaces for inspiration, Harvey plunges under, to a form of expression grounded in the intuitive and the mystical, an account of her own heroic journey into consciousness. Harvey fits more neatly into rock's canon than virtually any of her peers, partly because she neither fears nor scorns it. While her sound takes more from punk thoroughbreds like the Pixies, the Fall, and Nick Cave (even Tom Waits), Harvey also recorded a version of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited" on Rid of Me, and she gives a subtle nod to Bo Diddley on the title track of To Bring You My Love. Raised in relative isolation in rural England, where she still resides, Harvey exhibits no anxiety of influence, assuming-as did those boomer artists punks love to hate-her right to reinvent the form as her own pure, liberating experience. Yet she goes beyond the boomers by questioning the possibility of such liberation, not simply in music, but in all human experience. What she desires is impossible. But on a symbolic level, she realizes it again and again. On each of her albums, Harvey has refined her vision, without abandoning her original fascinations. Rarely has an artist been so thematically and stylistically consistent without sinking into self-cannibalization. But Harvey's chosen subject-the physical experience of extreme emotion, mostly grounded in unfulfilled desire-just keeps showing more complex layers. On the surface, this manifests in lots of songs about lost lovers, but time spent with these lamentations reveals their subtexts. Dry, recorded with the trio of Harvey on vocals, guitar, and violin, Robert Ellis on drums, and Stephen Vaughan on bass, confronts femininity's constraints in jagged songs based (like all of her music) around Harvey's reckless vocalizing. Moaning, yowling, straining into a falsetto and then plunging toward an open-throated yell, Harvey uses the natural breadth of her voice to go beyond the singer's usual palette. Despite weak moments elsewhere, songs like "Sheela-Na-Gig" and "Dress" rollick along as she chases her singing with her guitar; her mates support her wild explorations-Ellis's drumming a crucial part of the engine-but they're definitely in the background. Rid of Me releases a furious female energy, as Harvey calls forth the mythic power of women using eroticism to move beyond biological constraints. It's there in her mummery of familiar temptresses (Eve, Tarzan's Jane) and mad lovers, but it's also in the music. Harvey, Ellis, and Vaughan shred the basic rock form through an oversized approach. Short songs move sickeningly fast; ballads drag and bolt as if afflicted with manic depression. Steve Albini's production, an attempt to claim this power for himself, ultimately makes emotional sense of Harvey's jones for excess through wild dynamic shifts. Those who disdain Albini may prefer the album of demos released after Rid of Me, many of which appear in final form on the album. The spare quality of the four-tracks highlight Harvey's adept emotionalism, and a few killer cuts ("Driving," "Easy") appear nowhere else. But as good as it is, this is not an album of finished material, and pales a shade in comparison to Harvey's studio work. There's no question about who owns the power on Harvey's next studio album, To Bring You My Love. No longer working with Ellis and Vaughan, Harvey leads a variety of musicians, including ax wizard Joe Gore, ex-Birthday Party guitarist Mick Harvey, and her teenage years bandmate John Parish-and the usually more controlling alternarock engineer-king, Flood-through a set of songs that carry her theme of physical and spiritual transformation to its next, supernatural step. On first listen the album sounds remarkably spare, but repeated spins disclose myriad sounds dislocatedly floating in open territory- very quiet harmonics, for example, or three guitar lines intertwining over Harvey's keyboard bass. As always, religious and mythical images dominate. But the most impressive phantasm here is Harvey herself, arising from the waters of her own imagination like an avenging archdevil. Moments of fleshy transcendence like the title track, "Teclo," and "The Dancer" make clear exactly where Harvey is taking us now. In these songs, the boundaries of identity are broken-there's no line between masculine and feminine, human and divine. Instead, there's a sense of grace that comes from having breached those divides within the self. For all the pain it communicates, this vision is utopian; rock'n'roll, not as a route to simple transcendence, but as the primary agent in a spirit's metamorphosis. (Powers) |
