PJ Harvey -
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

PJ Harvey's first five albums dealt with unrequited love, loneliness, lust...the dark side of love... with more brutal honesty and raw anger than most people can stomach.  Thus, it's rather surprising to hear how, on her sixth release "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea", the characters in her songs are suddenly head-over-heels IN love.  And it's also surprising to hear how well her she-devil voice suits songs about such stuff.  That simmer-to-boil rage, that "you can run but you can't hide" roar, is now declaring love, revelling in it, even bragging about it.

For this album, Harvey reunited with the production team from her breakthrough album, "Dry"--Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey.  "Stories..." is a return to PJ's early, guitar-based sound, yet frosted with the atmospheric studio tricks that dominated 1998's "Is This Desire?"  The involvement of Thom Yorke from Radiohead is a bonus as well; his haunting falsetto backing vocals give a dark, dreamy quality to tracks that might otherwise have seemed too hard-edged, and his passionate lead vocals on "The Mess We're In" seem a natural fit interweaving with hers.

It's amusing how much Harvey's "head over heels in love" sounds like her "don't touch me" rage.   In either case, it's a voice of defiance, daring someone to challenge her opinions and her temper.  But the voice has matured along with the perspective.  In the first three songs, she shows impressive range, and she controls her Patti-Smith-level energy enough to remind us of more elegant voices like Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders.

The fact that many of these songs are set in New York is no surprise.  New York has been the setting of so many classic romances.  You will probably not be reminded of any previous love stories.    Rather than being lovers in a dangerous time, these are dangerous lovers, in love with each other, and in love with a dangerous city.  Despite the corruption and how "so many people are out of love", Harvey seems giddy with the possibilities for finding stories in this cosmopolitan landscape:

Speak to me of heroin and speed
Of genocide and suicide, of syphilis and greed
Speak to me the language of love
The language of vioence, the language of the heart

The city does not seem to hold redemption in these self-destructive pursuits, and it seems, sadly that even romance is doomed to fall short and leave her groping for what comes next.  It's the thrill of affection and sex in the heart of the city that provides her temporary escape from despair.  Only the singer of "A Place Called Home" seems to look beyond circumstances for an eventual peace, for a transcendent rest, something she can imagine when she's in the company of love:

I wade
Through full lands
And lonely
I stumble
With you
I wait
To be born again
With love comes the day
Just hold on to me.

This is an album of elevation, taking the listener to the tops of buildings where you "can see for miles", up stairways to high rise apartments, and at one point the singer yearns for someone soaring over her "eight miles high."  She throws her good fortune off of tall buildings.  She thinks of shooting stars.  And at times she cruises along the streets in her lover's car. 

As the title of the album implies, Harvey portrays a split personality here, in love with her newfound city life, but eventually dreaming of oceans and horses.  There are constant references to contact across great distances, probably implying these lovers correspond with phones, e-mail, all the tools available to them.  And yet, such contacts drip with melancholy and longing, that inability to truly connect.  Her lover (sung by Yorke) sings to her of their "lovemaking/on-screen...." In "Beautiful Feeling", the album's most hushed and haunting track, she confides, "Sometimes I can see for miles/Through water and fire/From England to America/I feel life meet my eyes." Life remains observed, faraway, and yet even that incomplete detachment is a thrill.  Is she referring to an e-mail attachment, a tv-phone, or a photograph in a letter when she mentions the significance of  "A smile from San Diego...."?

The intimacy of these notes and admissions is also not surprising.  Harvey has set a standard for songwriters making themselves vulnerable, telling everything, warts and all.   In "This is Love" she admits to the irrational magnitude of her passions: "I just wanna sit here and watch you undress.../I wanna chase you round the table..."  It's good to find some tenderness too, maybe even a blush passing across her face here and there. "We lean against railings/Describing the colours/And the smells of our homelands/Acting like lovers...." 

As these relationships head for rocky waters in the final songs, she reins in the famous rage, opting for optimism instead, finding hope in the wreckage.  There is an affirmation of strength in the recurring refrain "I have pulled myself clear", in "Horses in my Dreams".   And in the final track, "We Float", she comes to some humble wisdom about how it all happened, and why.  "This is kind of about you/ This is kind of about me/We just kind of lost our way/But we were looking to be free".  With that admission, she can lift her eyes and claim, "One day we'll float...take life as it comes."

For the characters of the songs, love may not have brought them to redemption or enlightenment, but it's given them a taste of something higher than the "hustles" of the streets.   It has broadened the horizons of what is possible, and in spite of the wounds it has given them strength to try again.  I can't venture to comment on whether these songs are autobiographical or not, although many assume they are.   Whatever is the case, it is clear that Harvey is offering us a fuller picture of relationships and possibilities between men and women than she has before.  Bands like R.E.M. have dared to be different by avoiding songs about love until ten years into their career.  For PJ love, at its most fractured and painful,  has always been the subject.  Now, at last, good love is in her vocabulary. 

Many rock-and-roll women have made careers drawing attention to themselves, and have diminished into self-interested egomaniacs.  PJ has always been able to avoid mere navel-gazing, taking her experiences and raising them to mythic levels with which most people can sympathize.    It seems she has turned a corner in her songwriting with this album.  I would hope that she might explore new territory next time, having exposed her wounds and bruises, having told of new discovery and strength.   But PJ remains a genuine artist in a crowd of imitators, and I sincerely doubt she'll ever be predictable.