| PJ Harvey Performance: Excoriating Recording: Good You must love, but you hate love. In fact, you love the hate that love provides. You are Polly (PJ) Harvey and you use rock-and-roll to wallow in your passion. For her first album, "Dry," Harvey tapped her wellspring of ugly emotions and produced a gusher. With "Rid of Me," she's created another album of dangerous, important music. It's hard to describe the fury of Harvey's music without making it sound completely repulsive. That's because repulsion is one of the key ingredients in her songs, which start in her blackened heart and stay there.The push-pull of love takes Harvey to extremes, as in Legs, when she considers the possibility of being jilted: "I might as well be dead / But I could kill you instead." In Rub Till It Bleeds, she calls her [over weak, only to take it back almost immediately, saying, "I was joking," and to offer, in acid conciliation, to "rub it / until it / bleeds." We don't really know what "it" refers to, but we don't really want to know. The factof PJ Harvey's menace is enough for anyone. The soundtrack for all this nastiness is rather skeletal. Guitar, bass, and drums come together in punchy rhythmic patterns, and melodies are spare, offered a little at a time, as if Harvey is clenching them in her fist. Only blasts of grunge guitar are used to modulate her rage. In "Dry," Harvey used her rhythm section of drummer Robert Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan in a rather sinuous way, pushing them forward in the mix and lettingher own astringent guitar play off them. In "Rid of Me," Harvey puts the guitar up front so that she can wait without obstruction, but in doing so she also loses some of the tension between white hot brutality and dark beauty that made "Dry" so powerful. To question this musical choice, however, is to assume that Harvey has a choice. She might not agree. Harvey has the ultimate case of the modern woman's blues-or perhaps they have her-and yowling to a beat may help her toeliminate anything that comes between her and the pain. |
