PJ Harvey
Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
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NATN Recommended
PJ Harvey
Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
Island, 2000
RiYL: Jeff Buckley, Patti Smith, Radiohead, Shudder To Think |
No sir. Instead, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, Miss Harvey's fifth album under the PJ Harvey moniker, is the artist's most wide-screen, musically accessible set of tunes to date. Indeed, Gotham's mile-long emotional extremes are perfectly suited for a narrator such as Harvey. On the envigorating opener "Big Exit," she's "immortal" while in the company of that certain someone, but she's still packing heat just in case. On first single "Good Fortune," reacquring the "innocence of a child" can be as simple as strolling through Little Italy. But by the song's end, all Harvey can fantasize about is setting off "on the run again," once again uncomfortable in her own skin.
It's this tightrope walk of self-doubt that makes Harvey's narratives so compelling. In interviews around the time of her first two albums, she insisted that people were taking her inside-out tales of sex and desire too seriously, missing the humor intended therein. For sure, the yuk quotient in her material remains a matter of debate, but there seems to be very little here intended as intentionally obfuscating. Harvey has clearly mined her New York experience for all its worth -- both personally and on record.
Naturally, Harvey is too smart to just spill the beans. "You Said Something," set to a jolly pub sing-a-long melody, reveals everything -- the Manhattan rooftop view, singing as the elevator rises to the 8th floor -- but the titular "something" that she's "never forgotten." Set to a thick guitar clamor circa Rid Of Me, her earthly concerns take a backseat to carnal urges on "This Is Love," while the churning, vocally acrobatic "The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore" is an old-fashioned tug-of-war between good and evil.
Better still is "This Mess We're In," a tale of doomed love sung largely by Radiohead's Thom Yorke. It's one of his few guest spots that doesn't sound like a Radiohead throwaway, and it's a joy to hear him breathing his own persona into Harvey lyrics such as "night and day / I dream of making love to you now, baby / lovemaking onscreen / impossible dream."
Musically, Stories is rich with texture and memorable melodies. The songwriting is complex without getting difficult for art's sake. Spiraling piano lines add urgency to the dark, gorgeous "A Place Called Home," while the misty, dead-of-night ballad "Horses In My Dreams" and the sublime closer "We Float" spread their sonic wings with far-off piano strokes, cushy bottom-ends, and Harvey's ever-changing inflection. There's a palpatable Jeff Buckley influence on the guitar progressions, while Harvey seems to be channelling Patti Smith's quavering voice on more than one occasion.
"We Float" serves as the ideal end to Stories, its lengthy repetition of the key phrase "one day we'll float / take life as it comes" assuring the listener that said day is still more than a binocular-enhanced view from shore. It's Harvey's way of admitting that sometimes there are no answers to the big questions, and no easy ways out of the messes. And at a time when one man's reality is another man's nightly television entertainment, it's tough to imagine a more worthy reporter from life's front lines.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"