Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
PJ Harvey isn’t a performer who can swoop across the globe with the guarantee of selling out stadiums every time she tours, but she’s surely an entrenched part of the music establishment by now. She is an artist whose track record means that every new release is greeted with warm, expectant scrutiny, a respected stature that was only codified by last year’s magnificent Let England Shake, which earned her the prestigious Mercury Music Prize for the second time, making her the only performer who has claimed the honor more than once (she previously won for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, released in 2001). She’s so revered in some quarters that it can be easy to forget the time when she didn’t automatically receive attention. Instead, she had to demand it.
It’s been 20 years since Polly Jean Harvey released Dry. At that point, the name PJ Harvey stood for the trio she fronted: besides herself on vocals and guitar, the band included Robert Ellis on drums and Steve Vaughan on bass. Truth is, no matter what the moniker officially stood for, it was clear from the very beginning that the hurricane of notes and howls that blasted from the record belonged foremost to the woman at the center of the storm. Harvey gave the record its voice, in every sense of the word.
Even all these years later, it’s the sheer force of Dry that’s so striking. Harvey wasn’t drawing from punk as much as she was pulling a spirit of freeing abandon from influences that had themselves carried the fire forward from the rafter-rattling icons of punk: artists such as Nick Cave and the Pixies. Though there’s some of the dynamic of shifting aggressively between loud and soft that characterized the transformative song structures of Black Francis, the main thing Harvey embraces is a refutation of any rules, boundaries or patterns. As tight and admirably controlled as all of the songs are, there’s an overwhelming sense that they’re dragging the band forward rather than vice versa, as if they were pure expressions of Harvey’s swirling, conflicted psyche. Harvey was just 22 when the album was released and the music seems riled to life by the scorched need of youth. Every transgression causes the greatest ache imaginable, and the only solution involves shouting out the pain.
I tend think of Dry as an unrelentingly raw album that offered only the barest of hints of the refinement that would show up on later releases, but a fresh listen shifted that perception. Yes, the album is somewhat starker and harsher – in ways that are frankly thrilling – but Harvey was already exploring the clever ways she could bend melody and tone to her will. “Dress” surges with a sprightly certainty and “Happy and Bleeding” has a tender intricacy to it, occasionally moving towards the brink of an explosion without succumbing to that sonic release. There are intriguing layers within the songs, such as the strings that sound like they’re trying to break from some sort of painful shackles on “Plants and Rags.” Even when Harvey is trying to test the endurance of the mixing board (“Joe” moves with such jittery power that it sounds like the band is trying the shake the whole world into fragmented scrap) there’s an artfulness that makes it clear that she’s not trying to disguise a lack of songwriting chops with boosted decibels.
Of course, it was the frankness of her lyrics that first struck a lot of listeners, and it is notable how many of the songs spill out like barbed poetry. Harvey immediately had a way with disarming honesty and inspired contrasts. “Sheela-Na-Gig” is vivid enough in its depiction of sexual rejection, but there’s something especially intriguing about the way that Harvey appropriates an old South Pacific lyric about moving on (“Gonna wash that man right out of my hair”) and smacks up against her own far more salacious take on the same forthright independence (“{Gonna take my hips to a man who cares}”). It’s perhaps the most direct and literal manifestation of Harvey’s impulse to do things her own way, consequences be damned. It’s commonplace enough to operate with that fervor in one’s youth. Considering PJ Harvey’s debut against all that followed, it’s exciting to note that for her, the impulse hasn’t faded one bit
