PJ Harvey - Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
(Island)
Not quite actually the return to her glory days as the guitar swinging,
dirty talking, super tough ass queen of rock and roll I had personally
hoped for, this new album has PJ Harvey once again playing guitar and
singing in an only minimally embellished trio with Mick Harvey on bass and
old favorite Rob Ellis on drums, but performing songs with perhaps her
lightest touch to date. Listeners should neither expect the spit and bile
of Dry or Rid of Me, nor the lush, passionate sounds of To Bring You My
Love. Instead, Harvey settles into light, precisely performed pop songs,
occasionally tinged with country and folk.
Disappointingly, the production emphasizes the lean towards prettier,
simpler songs. The guitars are clean and bright, the vocals distinct. The
drums are, unfortunately, recorded in the proudest Brit-pop tradition--paper
thin, often under-represented in the mix, with only the barest hint
of bass drum or propelling thump in the snare, and plenty of fake sounding
reverb. It's sad to hear Rob Ellis's incredible drumming rendered so
uninspiring. The sound works for the "nicer" songs, but there are others,
such as "Big Exit," "Kamikaze," and "This Is Love," that could have been
hair-raising Rid-of-Me-esque rockers had their exciting parts been made to
sound appropriately exciting.
It's my feeling that this album is not all it could have been, but it's a
very enjoyable one nevertheless. The good news is that the pretty songs
are very pretty. I have a feeling that "Horses In My Dreams" with
its distant, dreamy sound and haunting, simple piano parts will likely
become a personal PJ Harvey favorite, and there are others that are
similarly good. The album as a whole may be Harvey's most beautiful vocal
performance yet. Her voice is for the most part more controlled and
professional sounding than ever, but with plenty of her unique, sensual
character left intact. Thom Yorke's vocals on two songs give the album
some nice variation and will surely appeal to the world's zillions of
Radiohead fans, some of whom will likely turn Stories From the City,
Stories From the Sea into their first PJ Harvey selection. Let's just
hope that some of those Radiohead fans will fall so in love with Harvey
that they'll go back and buy Dry and Rid of Me, thus discovering, possibly
for the first time in their lives, what rock and roll is actually supposed
to sound like.
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