POLLy Jean Harvey - The PJ Harvey results thread

otm!!!!
she doesn't really want you to lick her legs, she just wants to say "lick my legs" because it's fun

Totally OTM, I sometimes imagine ROM (the album) as something she wrote just to screw with guys' heads, IOW, if a girl sang you these songs you'd probably shit yourself with fear and/or nervousness and that's the whole point of it all.

My top five albums were exactly the same as the poll results (in the same order too) except with "Stories" in place of ITD. I loved ITD when it came out but have cooled on it a lot over the years.

I will stan for "You Said Something" and "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" until the end of time, especially the latter, because she hasn't shown that kind of fire on record since.

You haven't heard A Woman A Man Walked By, then?

Stories is my #2, I've got fond memories attached to it but really I just love that guitar sound, I can't even think of any other records from around that time with the same sort of production. (FWIW I only got into PJ when a friend played me Is This Desire? so this was only the second of her albums I'd heard). UHH is definitely my least-favourite but even that's a minor mis-step.

Rid of Me wasn't in my Top 5 but I can understand people who prefer Rocking PJ picking it as their favourite.

Uh Huh Her isn't a very good record but it's a fascinating one in terms of her artistic path. It sounds totally like a sketchbook - confused, scrappy, sometimes falling back on old tricks but then, on Desperate Kingdom of Love for example, nailing her new direction. I hear that song and I'm like, oh hello White Chalk & Let England Shake.

Share Lex's lack of enthusiasm about Rid of Me. I thought Is This Desire? would be her Erotica (which it kind of is) and place in the top 3.

My beef with all ILX polls is that the early stuff is always overrated and the later work underrated, even with a career as interesting as PJ's. I'm not sure if that's to do with the lasting intensity of youthful fandom, or the impact of hearing an artist for the first time, but results often (huge generalisation here) confirm the cliche that it's all downhill after your first decade.

I listened to Stories again for this poll and man aside from tracks 2 through 4 is that album ever rmde

Yeah. Has she ever recorded a string of tunes as inert as "Good Fortune" and "A Place Called Home" and sequenced them consecutively? Ick.

I think "A Place Called Home" is incredible. I remember getting the advance of the album and listening to that track five times in a row on my DIscman on the train. Different strokes, etc. People who hate on this record are as perplexing to me as people who think "White Chalk" is her best.

yikes, 20 years

anyone else see the tour where Tricky opened?

Do you remember what year that was? 1995?

Yeah. One of the shows I most regret missing when I was at university.

My beef with all ILX polls is that the early stuff is always overrated and the later work underrated, even with a career as interesting as PJ's. I'm not sure if that's to do with the lasting intensity of youthful fandom, or the impact of hearing an artist for the first time, but results often (huge generalisation here) confirm the cliche that it's all downhill after your first decade.

― Deafening silence (DL), Thursday, April 25, 2013 3:41 AM (2 hours ago)

in the case of artists who eventually arrive at some measure of accessibility and popularity from a more challenging, perhaps punk-rooted starting point, it's almost inevitable. their initial ability to provide the shock of the new becomes the foundation of their artistic legacy. whatever they do afterward that may be interesting in whatever sense, but a great many fans will always reserve a special fondness for the early, calling-card transgressions.

Yes sure, in this specific case, but it's the same trend in practically every poll. Interested to see how the tracks roll out here.

There is a difference though - in their early tracks artists tend to rely on big hooks and impact; then later in their careers they explore more subtle pleasures, like form, textures or lyrical themes. It's no surprise that in a tracks poll the former gets the attention - my inclination is that that's more or less right, but later periods produce better albums.

Those things are true, but, again, the weird thing with PJH's discography is Let England Shake at the end of it, getting more attention (and votes) than most of what she's done.

in most cases, my favorite albums by my favorite rock & pop artists are from fairly early in their careers. not necessarily their very first public works, but typically from within the first decade of activity. i'd say that most get a 5-10 year run off their initial approach and energy, with long-running artists often managing a commercially and/or artistically successful last gasp or reinvention somewhere around the decade point. even allowing for such reinvention, though, the rock/pop artist who's still producing vital work and reaching a sizable audience twenty years out is a rare creature indeed. with that in mind, let england shake's #2 placement here is p remarkable.

or, uh, what eyeball kicks just said

i agree with stories being her worst but "you said something" and "one line" are breathtaking

oh wait and i love "beautiful feeling" too, the way it just rumbles out of nothing

thom yorke employed beautifully and subtly on the tracks he's on, two adjectives i'd normally never apply to him

Has she ever recorded a string of tunes as inert as "Good Fortune" and "A Place Called Home" and sequenced them consecutively?

I love both those tunes and the fact that they're sequenced together

anyone else see the tour where Tricky opened?

I saw it in NYC. Can't remember the venue. Irving Plaza maybe? I saw her on the Stories From The City tour at Bowery Ballroom which was phenomenal.

I do not understand all the contempt for that record here. And people hate Good Fortune? That is just nonsense.

delighted to see so much dissent

it's more or less a mainstream rock record, employs thom yorke, seems to issue from a position of domestic contentment, abandons most of the discomfort and experimentation of her other work

i like it a lot, but can see as how it might rub a lot of fans the wrong way

tbh the only song I loathe is the one about horses.

It doesn't even rub me up the wrong way. There are a couple of decent songs and a lot of OK but boring ones. The lyrics are embarrassing (to my ears) in lots of places. If Stories had been the first of her records I'd bought (and if it must have been the first for many people), I wouldn't have bothered with her again.

Alfred OTM about Horses ("Horses - In My Dreams" should've been the name of the album haha), but I also hate We Float. What an excruciating pairing.

It's only trendy to diss Stories because Beefheart doesn't like it.

I love that last pair of songs!

it's more or less a mainstream rock record

But it's a mainstream rock record of the highest caliber. She can write a hook like very few others. Stories is my favorite record of hers for the same reason Born In The USA is my favorite Springsteen: A world-class songwriter filling a record with hits.

I just wish she included Memphis on it, one of the alltime great B-sides.

What is this Memphis? I know not of it, and it's not on iTunes.

I mentioned this on some other PJ thread, but this is a good place to bring it up again:

A few years back PJ did the score for a Broadway show that a good friend of mine was involved in. My friend spent a lot of time with her, and said she is the nicest, most down-to-Earth person you could imagine. The polar opposite of her music: she was warm, friendly and unbelievably collaborative. Couldn't say enough nice things about her.

Memphis: her tribute to Jeff Buckley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcSkSTGrubo

"memphis" is awesome, yeah - so is "66 promises", the other "good fortune" b-side

Good Fortune and A Place Called Home have such massive singalong choruses, anyone who hates on those must necessarily hate fun.

The lyrics are embarrassing (to my ears) in lots of places

yeah this. good fortune is a good example - a catchy if unadventurous tune spoiled by these corny, pat lyrics. so un-peej.

She was happy! Happiness is simple. I thought Good Fortune did a great job of articulating the pleasant surprise of things actually going well for once, and also how delicate and fleeting that feeling is. I love that song.

feel like "good fortune" is hardly the nexus of terrible lyrics on that record. "big exit" despite its incredible exterior is pretty tough to endure lyrically

also i really love

things i once thought
unbelievable
in my life
have all taken plaaaaaace

I'll admit that Good Fortune is the only song from that album that I listen to at all. Don't remember the others tbh.

"and I feel like some bird of paradise" isn't bad either. At least that's what I think the lyrics are, I'm not 100% sure?!

You are missing out on some great songs, La Lechera. My #1 song came from Stories and it's not Good Fortune.

My #1 song came from Stories

mine too

"you said something" is so perfect, the music seems the casual expression of the lyrics

Huh, well I'll take that into consideration! I'm always willing to give PJ another chance.

love every bit of sftc, it's loose in a way none of her other records approach (or tbf attempt), and mature about happiness and love in a way nevermind none of her other records but few other rock records period attempt (maybe solo lennon on occasion)(maybe new morning?), in some ways the inverse of rid of me. at the time i was worried she was lost to mannerism (more due to the show i saw for itd? than itd? itself though the stagnation there was worrying also), this was the opposite of that and turned out to be the last time she was capable of surprising me.

The reviews at the time were overwhelmingly positive.

i mean i respect and admire and bow down before 'MAJOR ARTISTIC STATEMENT' records but increasingly i prefer the minor another day another dollar records. they're more revealing and human, they're usually funnier, and they're easier to live with.

I dunno – SFTC was a major statement, a typical I'm In Love and In The City record.

xpost well yeah the reasoning behind most of those contemp sftc reviews is suspect i will agree

soto i'm in love records are very different kind of artistic statments than i am now going to examine this thing we call love records, the former is dusty springfield the latter is sting

SFTC is both ("This is Love" the former, "Beautiful Feeling" the latter).

xpost well yeah the reasoning behind most of those contemp sftc reviews is suspect i will agree

― balls, Thursday, April 25, 2013 11:26 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Robert Christgau doubles his fun:

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea [Island, 2000]
If Nirvana and Robert Johnson are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love. But if you believe the Beatles and George Clinton had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire. It's a question of whether you use music to face your demons or to vault right over them. Either way the demons will be there, of course, and nobody's claiming they won't catch you by the ankle and bring you down sometime--or that facing them doesn't give you a shot at running them the fuck over. Maybe that's how Harvey got to where she could enjoy the fruits of her own genius and sexuality. Or maybe she just met the right guy. Tempos and pudendum juiced, she feels the world ending and feels immortal on the very first track. The other 11 songs she takes from there. A+

I know it's impolite to put it this way, but sometimes getting laid can really be good for a person. On the recorded evidence--with no claim to any lowdown on Polly Jean Harvey's actual private life, a mystery as closely guarded as the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and the formula for Coke--that's the secret of PJ Harvey's Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which even she allows is the happiest-sounding album she's ever made. What she daren't suggest is that it may also be the best.
The shift is first apparent in the music, which is, not to beat around the bush, fast. Way more easeful than the tightly wound, dynamically extreme bluesism of the career-launching Dry and Rid of Me, it's also way livelier than 1995's critical triumph To Bring You My Love, where Harvey's desperate carnality took a sharply metaphysical turn, and 1998's rhetorical question Is This Desire?, the answer to which was maybe. While her austere sonic signature remains, the vocals are discernibly more relaxed, the tunes welcoming and even expansive. Listen for shadings on the guitar attack, too--piano, organ, marimba, is that bandoneon? The album's an up from the first strums of "Big Exit," unquestionably the most rousing opener of her career.

Granted, maybe you'll smell shtick even so--our Polly, getting archetypal with the elementals again. After all, "Big Exit" does meditate painfully on human suffering. But the song's aesthetic thrust is all in the two lines of euphoria her ruminations try to rationalize away: "I'm immortal/When I'm with you." That's why it's so rousing. As she reports in the redolently titled "This Is Love": "I can't believe that the axis turns/On suffering when you taste so good." Long blessed with uncommon talent and success, Harvey can finally accept her "bad fortune slipping away."

Harvey has always been sex-obsessed. But there are better things to do with sex than obsess about it--enjoy it, for instance. And though the love affair the album describes or invents may end badly--e.g., the furious "Kamikaze," or the lovely "The Mess We're In," sung mostly by Radiohead's Thom Yorke--at least it sounds like a true affair, rather more full-bodied than "Robert DeNiro, sit on my face." Harvey and her beau ideal dance and get drunk, walk through Little Italy and sit looking at the skyline from a Brooklyn rooftop. Maybe they'll fulfill the dream of the finale: "But one day/We'll float/Take life as it comes." Or maybe she'll attain that state of grace with someone else. Whatever happens, this album will be there to remind her how happiness feels.

Rolling Stone, Nov. 9, 2000

Note: When printed, this was a four stars. As written it was 4.5 stars. In the Consumer Guide it is graded A+.

God he is DISGUSTING.