The Garden, a PJ Harvey Discussion Site

For a music critic in 2000, PJ Harvey’s fifth album might actually have seemed “bland” and “middling.” After two scabrous noise-rock masterpieces and a near-universally acclaimed third album of baroque goth-blues majesty, the trip-hop character studies of 1998’s Is This Desire? had met a more muted reception. Now, Harvey was posing in Times Square and crunching out glossy arena-rock. When mainstream music journalism was still abundant, part of Pitchfork’s role, as an upstart online zine, was serving as a corrective to thoughtless advance praise. The rampant maleness of music criticism at the time didn’t help: Even positive, eminently thoughtful reviews of the album could be off-puttingly brusque on matters of sex.

Of course, the context in which “glossy arena-rock” meant something bad is long gone, and while Harvey’s songwriting was more direct than usual on this album, it was also some of her best. Few songs evoke the romance of pre-9/11 New York more powerfully than the whirling late-night tale “You Said Something.” Thom Yorke lends his ghostly vocals to three tracks, including a lead turn on “This Mess We’re In,” a The Bends-style churner for the Kid A era. And while there wouldn’t have been anything wrong if Harvey had gone slicker and more straightforward, she has never settled down since, cementing her art-rock legacy on successive albums that’ve returned to primal intensity, explored the piano and a higher vocal register, embraced autoharp and war imagery, even deconstructed the protest record. Killing your idols can be a noble pursuit, but this exuberant city-love album deserves all the praise it can get. –Marc Hogan

sallytbyml wrote:What REALLY bothers me is that as part of their celebrations they made a list of the 200 most influential artists of the past 25 years and they didn’t include Polly!!!! To me it renders the entire list utterly redundant. Yes, some folks could argue that perhaps her earliest albums (which fall outside the 25 year review period) were the ones that established her - there are definitely people who discount the work she’s done after 1995. However, you only have to read the revised Stories review: “cementing her art-rock legacy on subsequent albums”. The number of artists included on their list who are influenced and indebted to Polly makes her exclusion scandalous!

(…and obviously none of this really matters and who cares what Pitchfork thinks etc but I’m still going to have a moan)