Is This Desire? Reviews



Rolling Stone: 4/5 Stars

A classic-rock spinster druid in Dr. Marten drag, a demon stewardess on her very own astral plane, Polly Jean Harvey knows she has a great formula, and she doesn't mess with it on Is This Desire? Her lusty English-farm-girl voice and guitar still trace the fates of glamorously doomed heroines with names like Angelene, Leah and Elise. Harvey begins her tales with lines like "And he was walking in the garden" or "Catherine liked high places," and she can be trusted not to end them before she piles on the imagery: cold nights, howling winds, abandoned chapels, sex, sin, mysterious lights in the sky and rivers that symbolize something very unpleasant indeed. A less carnally confident singer would fall flat with so much melodrama. But Harvey's charismatic growl hasn't failed her yet, and she struts her stray-cat-stuff all over these twelve dark jewels.

Most of the album is muted balladry, revisiting the somber tone of past glories like "Missed," on Rid of Me, and "Hardly Wait," from 4-Track Demos. But for all the gothed-up Eurogloom, Is This Desire? is a lot of fun. Harvey makes her deranged fantasies of feminine evil sound like a righteous Saturday night, albeit a bleak and stormy one. "Angelene" is her answer to "West Country Girl," Nick Cave's valentine to her on his 1997 album, The Boatman's Call. Harvey plays a smalltown goddess with the prettiest mouth you've ever seen, jeering at God and the devil as just two more menfolk who want a piece of her. She moans her mating calls through distorted electrobeats on "No Girl So Sweet" and turns on her creepiest whisper for "The Wind." But for all of her fabulous masks, Is This Desire? hits home because it comes down to a very simple sentiment: Harvey wants to know what love is, and she wants you to show her. (Rob Sheffield)

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Pitchfork Media: 8.0/10

PJ Harvey has worn many masks this decade. Dry displayed the poetry of a woman whose innocence was not naivete. On Rid of Me, she was all grown, and so was her anger. To Bring You My Love was almost too grown, what with the evening gowns and operatics. And Dance Hall at Louse Point was both a melancholy art-house album and a celebration of collaboration: Harvey wrote the lyrics, but left the music to long- time collaborator John Parish. The one constant throughout has been Harvey's mesmerizing emotional outpouring, which is neither as precious as Tori Amos' nor as theatrically tortured as Courtney Love's. In other words, Harvey seems to have a grasp on her feelings, even if they occasionally consume her.

The one exception may be "Joy" from her new album, Is This Desire? The bleak tale is framed by a foghorn bassline and razor-cut percussion that's industrial and dated-- no doubt the doing of increasingly irrelevant producer Flood-- but Harvey's wailing lends the track dissonance and desperation: "No hope for Joy/ No hope or faith/ I've been believing in nothing since the day I was born/ It never was a question.") It's almost too painful to listen to, yet coming nine songs in as it does, it's understandable.

Is This Desire? is, for all intents and purposes, a collection of bleak short stories. When Harvey gently mutters "My first name Angelene/ Prettiest mess you've ever seen" on the opening track, it's her voice you hear, but an imaginary soul she's conjuring. Likewise on the first single, "A Perfect Day Elise," in which she cryptically recounts a man's desperate love (or lust) for two women.

Flood's electro- heavy production can be overbearing, but when he gets the balance right, it reveals a haunting side of Harvey. A great example of this is the broodish "My Beautiful Leah," which is reminiscent of Harvey's work with Tricky. Harvey reveals another, softer side through the elegant piano work of "The River," yet it all seems a means to properly stage her stories.

On the title track, Harvey forgoes much of the blunted sampling for a muted guitar and a simple question: Is happiness desire? The answer is not easy, and as with most of the tracks, Harvey cuts the story short, leaving satisfied curiosity for those who don't need everything explained and frustration for those who do.

Is This Desire? is yet another evolution for a musician whose career has become synonymous with change. Some may long for the PJ that told us she was "Happy and Bleeding," or the girl that proclaimed herself the "50 Foot Queenie," but Harvey seems intent on trying out every mask, and with each new one comes yet another set of emotions that's neither better nor worse than the last-- it's simply different. (Shan Fowler)

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Q Magazine: 4/5 Stars

Boasting 12 tracks yet clocking in at just a shade over 40 minutes, Is This Desire? is one of the most artfully truncated missives of bleakness and pain to have emerged from a jewel box or Digipack since the dawn of CD. Five more minutes would have destroyed it as surely as it would have sapped the will to live from anyone listening to it. As it is, it has an urgent, playlet feel - gripping while it lasts even if (whisper it soft) it's hard to be absolutely gutted when it stops. Is this catchy? Not entirely. 1995's To Bring You My Love was the last proper PJ Harvey album and, although no radio tart, its evil cabaret aspects and crude sexiness were the spoonfuls of sugar that helped the murky blues medicine go down.

Is This Desire? does not swing like that. Taking last year's Dance Hall At Louse Point ballet soundtrack as a starting point (her partner on that, former mentor John Parish, returns), it is at once dourer and more oblique, its skeletal ensemble (Parish, Bad Seed Mick Harvey, latter-day Captain Beefheart guitarist Eric Drew Feldman, Tom Waits's collaborator Joe Gore and 1991-vintage PJ Harvey band drummer Rob Ellis) cushioning Harvey's wearied moan with speaker-sizzling, jungle-style bass shudders and drums that pad like pall-bearers or flutter like DJ Krust with ticker trouble. There is one beautiful, goth-elegy guitar theme (A Perfect Day Elise, the single), one incomprehensible Moulinex Iggy Pop-esque migraine (No Girl So Sweet) and a song (My Beautiful Leah) that sounds like Tricky. That's Tricky now.

The stories she tells are similarly elusive. The songs' objects of desire are invariably women, obsessively viewed by a narrator who sounds cracked and spent. There are lady hermits, "sirens", women too beautiful to look at, lots of "sin" and dirtroads and wings and Nick Cave stuff (they had a fling, you know). There's a fantastic line: "I gave you my heart/You left the thing stinking". In The River, a couple wander down to the levee accompanied only by a squiggle of feedback and "silent birds" circling. There is a sense of awful, unspecified portent. Polly Harvey sings all these songs as though they may kill her and it's a trick which makes the less-good stuff about Is This Desire? - samey instrumentation, slight melodic drabness - much easier to manage. Ultimately, Harvey is unique. She does not sing about horrible things; she sings about ordinary things as though they are horrible. Which, in a way, is far more frightening. (Danny Eccleston)