PJ Harvey

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Essential Albums

  • To Bring You My Love
    To Bring You My Love
    To Bring You My Love

    After releasing two savage instant-classic LPs as a trio with drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan as PJ Harvey, Polly Jean Harvey blew up her band but got to keep the name. When it was released in February 1995, To Bring You My Love felt like a tectonic shift—in scope, in sonics, in stakes—as the bare-bones minimalism of 1992’s Dry and 1993’s Rid of Me gave way to something bolder and more dramatic. Harvey took on U2’s producer (Flood), their management and at least some of their ambition, trading grungy (as opposed to grunge-y) aesthetics for gowns and theatricality. But viewed from a distance, the album feels more of a piece with its predecessors than nearly anything that would come in her career subsequently. It’s a perfect fulcrum in a rich discography: Her presence is still feral, but tempered by the more nuanced textures and moods that she would come to explore further and eventually define herself by. The album’s key personnel—chiefly, her one-time bandmate John Parish and the Bad Seeds’ Mick Harvey—would become her most frequent and important collaborators over the ensuing decades, and To Bring You My Love reads like a road map of where they would later go. The opening title track sets the swampy, unsettling mood—a dark religious revival that channels the blues without mimicking it, forging a connection between American traditionalism and gothic English horror (see: the whispered, cursed incantation closing out “Down by the Water” — “Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water/Come back here, man, give me my daughter” ). “Long Snake Moan” and “Meet Ze Monsta” channel the ferociousness Harvey built her reputation on, while “Working for the Man” and, particularly, closing track “The Dancer” point Harvey forward, exploring the power in relative restraint, of withholding in all the spots where she used to deploy exorcism.
  • Rid of Me
    Rid of Me
    Rid of Me

    After introducing a trio sound that fan Warren Zevon likened to Bartok, PJ Harvey moved on to up the ante with producer Steve Albini. Bringing the use of soft-loud dynamics to a new, er, levels, Albini showcased the Harvey band's rumble in a way that made even their great debut, Dry, sound a little tame. Filled with sexual and social power and loathing, the record also put across a wicked sense of humor, as when a male band member howls a "Lick my legs, I'm on fire" mantra at the end of the title track or the outfit turns Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" into a sonic carnival ride. The blend was not unlike that of Polly Jean Harvey's hero Captain Beefheart, who was apparently pleased: The two have been confidantes for years.

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About PJ Harvey

Each PJ Harvey album is an exquisite, self-contained universe driven by vivid lyrics and adventurous music. Born in Dorset in 1969, Polly Jean Harvey grew up listening to folk, blues and experimental music before honing her guitar skills in the late ’80s while playing in the band Automatic Dlamini. She released her first records, including 1993’s Steve Albini-produced Rid of Me, as part of a trio named PJ Harvey; her unflinching lyrics and raw, abrasive guitars made these albums feminist rock touchstones. Harvey enjoyed her biggest mainstream success with 1995’s genre-defying To Bring You My Love and the brash pop-rock of 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Subsequent albums found her experimenting with her sound—notably on 2007’s fragile, hushed White Chalk, on which she wrote songs on piano—and lyrical content; 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project offered political and social critiques, while 2023’s I Inside the Old Year Dying was based on her poem Orlam.

HOMETOWN
Dorset, England
BORN
9 October 1969
GENRE
Alternative

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