It’s worth bearing in mind that six full-length examples of bad behaviour, verve and dissonance down the line, while you’d hardly label Polly Jean Harvey eclectic, she’s never gone and made the same record twice. She’s nudged her perimeters, sure, but each record has just been about toiling with a different demon, wearing a different dress, opening the blinds or closing them, approaching the same subject from various directions or different subjects from the same place. Defining her has never really been a problem. Yet she doesn’t fade, and continues to flower so very brightly with most passing seasons.
Her career also continues to take on a developing pyramidal structure. At its peak, in terms of its production values and atmosphere, were ‘To Bring You My Love’ and particularly the less well received ‘Is This Desire?’, buffed surfaces and full-bodied backdrops. Then either side were the grimy and ravaged debut ‘Dry’ and its unhinged follow up ‘Rid Of Me’, and recently 2000’s sharp, acclaimed urban rock of ‘Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’. Completing the sextet and joining the dots, ‘Uh Huh Her’ is now down on its scuffed knees and stripped away to its bones.
It’s bare, perhaps more than she was early on. And reflective, even vulnerable, where she has previously seemed so much more upfront and threatening as a whole package. Gone is the chic of ‘Stories…’, from the design of the inlay down to the very spirit of the songs, replaced with a rough DIY ethic. Which is why on first impressions the kinds of direct musical action we’ve come accustomed to fail to materialise. But there’s a resonance, a strong resonance and sense of being, that takes a short time to settle in. And it does settle in, it drags you down too and eventually comes very close to consuming you entirely.
It’s not all like that, ‘Who The Fuck?’, for instance, is abrasiveness itself and a wake up call to those who think Karen O invented shouting, and ‘The Letter’ is repetitive and gnashing, but restrained, a feisty something with sharp teeth on a short leash. But she’s always been a powerfully classic, emotive songstress beneath everything else and this rises to the surface and takes the focus through otherwise stagnant, muddy waters on the beautifully dark Nick Cave-esque ‘It’s You’ and minimal mournful strumming of ‘The Desperate Kingdom of Love’ and ‘The Darker Days Of Me & Him’. It’s all quite Velvet Underground in its hypnotic simplicity (especially ‘Pocket Knife’).
It sounds like she’s riding peripheral waves of emotion, rather than being the hand that delivers the blow on this album. Which is more mature, yes, but also more informed and compassionate. It makes for a more rounded experience, but one that doesn’t forsake the belligerence that got her here in the first place, which speaks volumes for her self-regimentation. There’s a cut and pasted (old-school) note in the inlay which reads “if struggling with a song, drop out the thing you like the most”. The waste paper basket in her studio must be laden with precious rocks.
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