PJ Harvey... wilfully losing her self in the service of art

For her latest, A Woman A Man Goes By, PJ has teamed up with the unrepentantly retrograde, producer-musician John Parish. This is most definitely a collaboration and you can hear the teamwork involved. It took me a while to figure out why - but I think it's simply because you can hear the bits which aren't PJ. It's her voice, so deeply familiar, but the lyrics sounds strange in her mouth, the rhythms and background tones are subtly changed. In fact, purely on the impression received, I suspect that Parish wrote all or most of the songs originally, and then they got together to figure out how to execute them.

It's as though she's performing a script. It's not her own music. Even just as a vocalist she's amazing, but it's fundamentally different to her own work. Parish must be a very strong-minded individual. Given the force of PJ's artistic persona and the uniqueness of her sound, it surprises me that anyone could appropriate Her Polly-ness for anything. Intuitively I would have assumed that you'd write for her, you would adapt yourself to her world. To take that voice, the character she has and use it to express your own message, well, it's uncompromising to say the least.
The album opens with the, in this context, easy-listening "Black Hearted Love", before cantering madly about through more progressive, dissonant territory. Whereas PJ's own work will generally employ taut muscular electric guitar and drums, here she's often backed by a plunking banjo, or a sparse piano, and accompanied by herself on backing vocals. Stylistically, it's reminiscent of a less Nordic, more English, Bjork. I'm reminded that one of the great things about PJ is her love of words; with each song she uses her voice to prod and pull at the words, to batter them, to drag them by the hair, and occasionally, to violently disembowel them into a bloody heap on the floor. It's nerve-tingling-ly visceral, though sometimes, perhaps unavoidably, going too far and becoming utterly unlistenable as in "April".

The centrepiece of the album is the title track. A romping, chaotic, foul-mouthed, vaudeville freak show of a song... a diatribe about some rough trade experience gone wrong?... deliberately gender-confused by putting the words into a woman's voice. "Pig Will Not" is another wonderfully crazy mess of a track, seemingly made up and recorded in real time it's largely PJ ranting and wailing over a hailstorm of drums.

They're touring the UK shortly and I''ll be checking them out in London. Can't wait to see this performed... just not sure I'll listen to it much at other times.