Uh Huh Her

by

PJ Harvey

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PJ Harvey belongs to that small group of musicians -contemporary artists, really- who are expected, and so necessary, to navigate times of pretense, caution and despair. When so many former figures of iconoclastic Rock disappear into the woodwork of making the charts and grasping for Grammies, PJ Harvey can be counted on to be uncompromising and expose herself first.

See, for me even more than the justified expectation of some great new music from a personal favorite, PJ Harvey's work represents the desire for more songs from an authentic voice, an uncompromising wail of dissent toward mediocrity and complacency -if you don't believe me, check out what happened with Liz Phair.

For this alone, it had already been too long to wait for a new album, specially given the power and poetic density of her most recent predecessor, the superb Mercury Prize winning "Stories by the Sea ...," and I welcomed excitedly the arrival of "Uh Huh Her."

In terms of artistic integrity, this album does not disappoint, from the menacing chords of the first song to the "in-your-face" pleading of "The Letter."

Overall, in my opinion, "Uh Huh Her" is not musically groundbreaking, and although I don't mean this as an automatic put-down, I initially thought of Harvey's choice to produce all songs and play all instruments -except drums- as a choice that limited the kind of emotional range her music often has. There's always a creative danger to doing it all yourself, no one else to listen to, dare you in different directions or push you beyond your, however large, musical envelope.

Yet, as I stay with her songs -rather than be distracted by my own expectations- I realize that where this album will stretch your perceptions of PJ Harvey's work is in her lyrics. This is an album that wears her outrage, pain and longing on its sleeve -"The Letter," again, "Shame" or "The Slow Drug"- and dares to be raw or tender with the same conviction -"It's You" or "You Come Through" respectively.

More specifically yet, this is an intimately personal album. The losses and darknesses hovering her words, I imagine, could not be trusted to a band, they had to expressed by herself alone. I am convinced this was the only way she could stay vulnerable -whether it's "Shame," "Pocket Knife" or "The Desperate Kingdom of Love"- and, given the results, it was an honorable and courageous decision.

Though 2000's "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea" garnered her some of the best reviews of her career, it left many of Polly Jean Harvey's more diehard fans aghast. You can see why - in a volte face similar to what Hole managed on "Celebrity Skin", Harvey had shed much of the angst and insecurity of her previous work and created an alarmingly FM-friendly record. Most people were content to cheer her on (indeed, she won the coveted Mercury Music Prize in her native UK), but some of the devoted few couldn't help grumbling that "their Polly" had been lost amidst a suspiciously AOR gloss and lyrics about guns, drugs and Manhattan.

Suffice to say that the latter are in for a treat here. "Uh Huh Her" has more in common with Harvey's "difficult" work ("Is This Desire?", the John Parish collaboration "Dance Hall at Louse Point") than it does with "Stores...". It's not the most comfortable of listens, replete as it is with couplets along the lines of It's You's "When I'm not with you I walk dark tunnels of my heart / When I'm not with you everything comes apart". Passionate, heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, yes, but - as anyone who's read Prozac Nation will know - that can all get a bit much after a while.

A more compelling criticism is that some of what's on offer here feels a little, well, half-baked. "The Slow Drug" sounds like a B-side, "The End" is just a throwaway instrumental, and the affecting "No Child of Mine" ends almost as soon as it's started. Seeing as how this comes on the back of a four-year hiatus, you might have been forgiven for expecting a bit more.

Not up there with the best of Harvey's work, then, but "Uh Huh Her" is not without its merits. Lead single "The Letter", for starters, is fantastic: "Put the pen / To the paper / Press the envelope / With my scent / Can't you see / In my handwriting / The curve of the g? / The longing..." - it's one of the most implausibly erotic things Harvey has ever written. "The Life and Death of Mr Badmouth", "Shame" and "Cat on the Wall" are all pretty strong, whilst "Who the F***?" hilariously debunks Harvey's Rid of Me persona as she rails against a hairdresser for messing-up her barnet.

All in all, this probably isn't the best place to start for people who aren't familiar with PJ's work. If she's already won you over, though, then "Uh Huh Her" should satisfy.