Wings of 'Desire': PJ Harvey Plays for Power

Is THIS DESIRE?

PJ Harvey

Island Records

Whither PJ Harvey? Three years ago, while on tour to promote her unforgettable To Bring You My Love album, the reclusive English songstress revamped herself in an almost literal way. Suddenly she became a sort of hybrid of Tammy Fae Baker and Siouxsie Sioux, her eyes swathed in colors more appropriate to tropical fish, her red gash of a mouth hissing out the stories of weary paramours and suffering Magdalenes, then growling out feverish invocations that "Yeah I'm ready to meet ze monsta tonight."

She wasn't talking about the bogeyman, either--or maybe she was. The signal, recurring lesson of PJ Harvey's music, is that desire leads us dangerously, thirstily, curiously into places where we would otherwise fear to tread. Harvey's lyrics were too lacerating to be mere come-ons, but the potency and drama of her music worked like a snake charm. The album and the woman combined the terror and the wonder of a hydra.

But which of those fierce, rearing heads was the real Polly Jean Harvey? Was there a woman behind the trademark moans and Frida Kahlo brows, or was it all the sound and fury of a woman who signified nothing in the theater of her own performances?

Harvey didn't stick around to clear things up. Besides a few side projects with interesting talents like Tricky and John Parish, she attests to having grown nervous with her growing fame and unconfident in the kabuki-ish performance art she was creating in concert.

Fans sorrowed to see her retreat, but if she had to hide out, at least she hid in a studio. The fruits of these three years now arrive in a new album titled Is This Desire? Harvey clearly wishes both to restate to the world what she can do and, as the title implies, to interrogate where music has taken her so far, and where she might still be headed.

The good news--the great, great news--is that Harvey is vocally and technically more proficient than ever, exploring new facets of her talent without diluting the haunted power or thrusting will that have always made her distinctive. The album does not distill any one mood as forcefully as To Bring You My Love did its carnality and despair, but as a project of introspection and self-testing, it requires that Harvey try all new vessels for her rich concoctions of favorite themes.

The album opens with "Angelene," the dry testimony of a world-wise hooker who longs for a lover "two thousand miles away," a yawn of separation that "lays open like a road." The figures in Harvey's tales rarely have access to the lovers they want, but Is This Desire? lends the trope a new layer of richness. Surely we should not ignore that Angelene both scans and rhymes with Polly Jean, and that an album whose title is a question must necessarily begin as a quest. After all, it is not the lover (who may, in fact, be imaginary) but the miles to be traveled that arrests Angelene's greatest attention. PJ Harvey expresses lament like no one's business, but like the harlots and hangers-on she portrays, she never gives up.

The body of the album, if "Angelene" may be taken as a prologue, is a sort of paganish Pilgrim's Progress, taken through marshes of despondency, moments of ecstasy, and often-recurring seas, pools, and rivers in which the singer pauses to gaze at her own reflection. Landscapes and climates are, appropriately, elemental to her experiences. A dervishy, barrelling cut called "The Sky Lit Up" describes a night with a lover in which times seems to freeze despite great activity: "Thinking of nothing, and the shooting stars/And this world tonight is mine/A world to be remembered in."

Quieter but even more arresting is "Electric Light," in which an electric organ at the lowest possible pitch substitutes for a flickering neon sign, illuminating and concealing the body of a female lover at regular intervals. The music never changes, and Harvey just watches, confessing that "she tears my heart out, every time." In the last verse, her voice lilts to a high, thin whisper as though all oxygen had run out of the room; the counterpoint to the neon drone bewitches, and Harvey, ever economical, stops the track early before the moment could be lost.

The signal virtue and surest proof of Harvey's talent is that, despite an expansive range of pitches and moods, her craft always combines precision with personality; like a jeweler or carpenter, she preserves the integrity of each song with specific and taut strokes, but incorporates enough elements of personal style--distorted vocals, plodding bass or cavernous echo--that the artist cannot be misidentified. "My Beautiful Leah," in which a phlegmy and diseased voice seeks clues to track the route of an aban-doing lover, lumbers thick and ungainly as a sauropod; "The Garden," by contrast, lilts and whispers like a dryer, spindlier version of Tori Amos's piano confessionals.

Is This Desire? grows a bit tired in its third quarter, which the structure of Harvey's 2,000-mile framework probably demands, but which nonetheless threatens the totality of the record's spell. "The River" in particular suffers from an inertia rare for Harvey. Its loping murmur is appropriate to the title image, and it's fun to hear her tinkering with brass, but a rather rote delivery ("And they came from the river/and they came to the road") and subjective vagueness (who is "they," and why does it become "we"?) make the song tiresome and opaque.

All the better, then, that Harvey follows it with "No Girl So Sweet," a blistering whirl of guitars and percussion that erupts into a signature banshee-howl, and finally concludes with the album's title track, which restates all of the questions with which she and the record embarked. "Is this desire?" she asks, then interjects "enough, enough!" as though over-whelmed by her own album's energy: Harvey needs space, in the end, to clear her thoughts and assess her position. Is desire an endpoint, or was it all along the process by which an invisible endpoint was sought--heartening but exhausting, like Harvey's songs? And what if we repunctuate: "Is this desire enough? Enough?" Here, Harvey's passion, evidenced in the album's whoops and tremblings, is no longer in question, but is it a reliable means of attaining whatever nirvana she was pursuing?

Is This Desire? never specifies the exact destination for which Harvey was reaching. The ride, though, is thrilling and fascinating, her riddles more powerful for remaining in code. Like Madonna's Ray of Light, which illuminated much but kept some spaces sacred, Harvey's album uses rock at its most modern and electronic to reveal--almost--an artist more fully and humanly herself than we have previously seen her. Even we who have loved all her incarnations will take pleasure and interest in what Polly Jean lays out for us here. God bless her--she tears our hearts out every time.