It’s almost like an unwritten rule, that eventually bands just get worse with age, and far too many of them don’t call it quits soon enough. And you know the cliché, to say you prefer a bands early stuff. Well here’s the exception, Polly Jean Harvey!
She didn’t really start off badly, her personality, her songwriting and trashy guitar playing meant that she slotted quite well into the end of the grunge era. But Harvey’s character and creativity was always headed for a more beautiful destination, right from the start. She’s particularly noted for consistently producing records that sound nothing like the last. And having surpassed many a conventional understanding of rock music, her sound has gradually progressed from the raw blues power of Dry to the well finished indie pop electronica of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, to the sweetly sung piano hymns of White Chalk. However, despite constantly changing her appearance and getting a bit bored of playing guitar, there is one thing that has remained the same, one constant that fuels her persistence in writing songs…
P J Harvey scares me just a little bit, but it’s her brutal honesty and emotion, as she pours it out almost sacrificially to herself, that draws me into her broken and beautiful world. And I think that’s why I love her music so much. She makes me uneasy sometimes and she can keep me on edge. But if you can sink through the harshness of her reality, as she presents it, you can easily immerse yourself in a thoughtful, considerate and intensely satisfying world of sound. And more than most other bands I listen to, P J Harvey can take me out of my self and consume me, with the power of her fragility. Every album I listen to has the same pulse, the same idea, the same feel, despite the constantly changing aesthetic. I listen to her as she mourns and laments and pulls through her experience of life and wraps it around instruments and words as she tries to find reason and meaning. This thrills me on a level where thrill and enjoyment seem to be an intrusion, but there is nothing like it.
I’m writing more specifically about one of her albums in a month or two. It’s an album that I think everyone needs to hear at some point. But for now, here is lovely a song from a joint album she did with a guy called John Parish. You probably wont like it…
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