POLLy Jean Harvey - The PJ Harvey results thread

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.

I have to work this evening, but I'll try to at least get the tracks run down started. 116 different songs were voted for. I'm going to do a top 60 countdown.

Before that, let's shed a tear for the three songs I voted for that didn't make the top 60:

haha he always got so creepy writing about her good lord. i know ppl here are already on record as finding it horrifyingly abysmal but i've always loved 'we float' as the closer, if you take it as straight forward hakuna matata (it means 'no worries') i can understand the horror but it's always played to me as this concluding statement, that on sftc you have this person who's been able to shrug off or revel in the agonies of life w/ intelligence or 'art' or sheer force of youth but those aren't enough for her (at least not today) and so either by meeting the right guy or just being in the right city she finds herself opening herself up to another person and relating to him as a person and not a construct and she's never known love like this before now she's lonely never more etc and maybe this is how you beat the demons but in a corner of her mind and on the occasional lyric something whispers 'maybe not' and so at the end she acknowledges this but hopes if not today maybe tomorrow. ten years later cut to some crone banging away on a piano about the war.

73. Happy and Bleeding - 64 points, 3 votes

Wow, I didn't know that many fans dislike Stories. I didn't vote but it's my favourite album of hers. (I only heard all of Dry very recently, though. It could give some competition.) I'm not a very lyrics-oriented listener. The tunes just feel more complete and satisfying to me.

There are some really intense moments on Rid of Me, and the sound is great, but the songwriting just seems incomplete to me, musically. The title track is classic though. My OPO is either that or "Sheela-na-Gig".

Also, wow, Christgau's an ass.

xposts

69. Teclo - 68 points, 3 votes

62. Ecstasy - 80 points, 4 votes

Teclo too loooooooow

69 & 62 were both cuts from my ballot.

I love "Kamikaze", voted for it, not big on the rest of that album but that song is great

if I'd have waited a day to vote I'd have voted for "Teclo", it got stuck in my head after I sent the ballot in

Teclo too slowwwwwww

Teclo was cut off mine at last minute too.

It was only a few places below my cutoff too

'teclo84' was one of my first AOL SNs

haha

Teclo too loooooooow

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 25, 2013 9:59 AM (1 hour ago)

holy shit, no kidding! my #5 and easily my favorite track off tbyml. kind of shocked, as i'd for some reason assumed it was one of her acknowledged classics.

gorgeous fucking song, nothing else she's ever done really sounds like it

I felt like I had to choose between "Teclo" and "The Dancer" on my ballot and plumped for the latter. Great to see "Happy And Bleeding" made it though.

^ exactly what I did.

"Teclo" doesn't have "Ah-AHH? AHHH-Ah!" tipping the scales in its favour.

it does have that ear-shuddering bass note tho

Nice tremelo guitar part too.

Xgau always freed to let out his inner sleaze when the artist in question flaunts sexuality. No doubt he thinks he's being edgy, or even calling them on the banality of their modest transgressions, but it always comes off so poorly.

Y'all are crazy, "Stories..." is soooo good, pretty much start to finish, definitely a better album than "To Bring You My Love." And even if I'm clearly the only one in the world who thinks it's a pretty dark record - opening lines!

Look out ahead
I see danger come
I wanna' pistol
I wanna' gun
I'm scared baby
I wanna' run
This world's crazy
Give me the gun

- even the "love" stuff after that is definitely tinged with darkness. I hear it all as a search for security and comfort, romantic or otherwise, in a horrible, batshit world. The words "hold me" shift in meaning, depending on how you hear them. Hold me, I love you. Hold me, I'm scared. Hold me, I feel so shitty I need someone to help me feel better. And so on. Even "We Float" is clearly an end of a relationship song. Dark, dark, dark. Reminds me of "Achtung Baby" meets Murnau's "Sunrise."

I voted for "Ecstasy". It's got the biggest gap between the ROM and 4TD versions. On 4TD it sounds ordinary, on ROM it's just about the heaviest thing going.

I voted for it too -- I love a good dirge and it's also v evocative.

60. The Darker Days of Me and Him - 83 votes, 5 votes

59. Snake - 83 points, 5 votes

Collaborative spotify playlist

Goddammit, Snake was my #9.

"the darker days of me and him" is so powerful and so calm at the same time. so relaxed and so strong. a pj harvey grand cru. she is so determined, she knows exactly what she is doing.

The Darker Days of Me and Him is just boring to me, and the lines about "With no neurosis / No psychosis" etc embarrassing. I do not relate to earnest Polly I think.

I don't really have anything to say about either of those songs. The name 'The Darker Days of...' meant nothing to me, so I was surprised to find out it was on Uh-Huh-Her (which I have, unlike the more obscure ones). 'Snake' to me was always just filler before the far superior 'Ecstasy'.

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/03/09/2030963_12576ab1.jpg

58. Fountain - 84 points, 4 votes

^ My number 4, love that song, the tension all the way through building up to

my I for
on hill wait wind

Hmph. ILX has fucked up the formatting of that last post and turned it into gibberish.

shame on you ilx

Yes, Fountain a great early example of building and building up to the end.

lol ecstasy was my no. 5