Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea Reviews



Rolling Stone: 4/5 Stars

I know it's impolite to put it this way, but sometimes getting laid can really be good for a person. On the recorded evidence -- with no claim to any lowdown on Polly Jean Harvey's actual private life, a mystery as closely guarded as the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and the formula for Coke -- that's the secret of PJ Harvey's Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which even she allows is the happiest-sounding album she's ever made. What she daren't suggest is that it may also be the best.

The shift is first apparent in the music, which is, not to beat around the bush, fast. Way more easeful than the tightly wound, dynamically extreme bluesism of the career-launching Dry and Rid of Me, it's also way livelier than 1995's critical triumph To Bring You My Love, where Harvey's desperate carnality took a sharply metaphysical turn, and 1998's rhetorical question, Is This Desire?, the answer to which was, maybe. While her austere sonic signature remains, the vocals are discernibly more relaxed, the tunes welcoming and even expansive. Listen for shadings on the guitar attack, too -- piano, organ, marimba, is that bandoneon? The album's an up from the first strums of "Big Exit," unquestionably the most rousing opener of her career.

Granted, maybe you'll smell shtick even so -- our Polly, getting archetypal with the elementals again. After all, "Big Exit" does meditate painfully on human suffering. But the song's aesthetic thrust is all in the two lines of euphoria her ruminations try to rationalize away: "I'm immortal/ When I'm with you." That's why it's so rousing. As she reports in the redolently titled "This Is Love": "I can't believe that the axis turns/On suffering when you taste so good." Long blessed with uncommon talent and success, Harvey can finally accept her "bad fortune slipping away."

Harvey has always been sex-obsessed. But there are better things to do with sex than obsess about it -- enjoy it, for instance. And though the love affair the album describes or invents may end badly - e.g., the furious "Kamikaze," or the lovely "The Mess We're In," sung mostly by Radiohead's Thom Yorke -- at least it sounds like a true affair, rather more full-bodied than "Robert De Niro, sit on my face." Harvey and her beau ideal dance and get drunk, walk through Little Italy and sit looking at the skyline from a Brooklyn rooftop. Maybe someday they'll fulfill the dream of the finale: "But one day/We'll float/Take life as it comes." Or maybe she'll attain that state of grace with someone else. Whatever happens, this album will be there to remind her how happiness feels. (Robert Christgau)

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Spin:

Polly Jean Harvey is a woman unafraid to plow the depths of her life -- the proverbial "belly of the whale," shall we say -- and has sent us postcards about her stay there in the form of albums. 1991's Dry and 1993's Rid Of Me marked her descent, her encounters with sex, Jesus, misogyny and more as she traveled along the dim, dirty path of "women in rock" en route to something bigger. 1995's To Bring You My Love was a milestone, an opus of love, betrayal and sadness set to a church organ and killer guitars, followed closely by her project with John Parish, Dance Hall at Louse Point, which further enunciated her "difficulties." Fittingly, 1998's Is This Desire? hit rock bottom, tinged with dark, mangled beats and the search for an identity amidst songs primarily about other women, possibly all found within Harvey herself.

Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, then, is Harvey's climb back up towards the light, having seemingly figured out who she is and what she stands for. The record does not take on the larger questions of God, as Rid Of Me's "Missed" did, or feature songs about women, like "Joy" or "Catherine" from Is This Desire? Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea is all Harvey - no beats or electronic twitches, no operatic vocal techniques. Just a girl and her guitar and, of course, some extra tidbits provided by Thom Yorke of Radiohead.

Many will be apt to call this her "New York Record" (or, ahem, her "New Yorke Record) but Stories is a collection of rock 'n' roll love songs -- some better than others -- told from a decidedly frank point of view. The songs are akin to Dry in terms of their rather straightforward composition, but are lacking the urgency of her debut. Instead, each track, still anchored by Harvey's marvelously off-kilter guitar lines, sounds comfortable in its own skin, a possible reflection of Harvey's own mellowed mood. "Good Fortune" celebrates the better moments in life (even being hungover - go fig) over jangling playful chords and that massive voice that effortlessly soars. "A Place Called Home" swirls with Harvey's declarations of love and ringing cymbals sounding like droplets of water cascading around you, courtesy of long- time Harvey drummer Rob Ellis. The album slows for the pulsing, quasi-religious "One Line" (complete with Yorke moans in the background) and the delicate "Beautiful Feeling" (also with Yorke's accompaniment), which combines poignancy and simplicity into four glowing minutes. It is the album's centerpiece that sticks the most, however: "The Mess We're In" hands Yorke the vocal reigns for the majority of the time while Harvey softly speaks, the piano shimmers and their voices converge for one moment of perfect harmony.

Unfortunately, from there the album gets much less interesting. "You Said Something" is lyrically trite and makes you wonder why it's there in the first place, while "Horses In My Dreams," though pretty, seems and sounds disjointed. All is redeemed, however, with the sweetness of "We Float," a song about acceptance and living life one day at a time. When Harvey's voice melts with the piano and drives itself deep into your heart on the song's chorus, you know she is bringing with her the truth of gospel.

Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea is a welcome recharging for PJ Harvey. It is a straightforward account of a woman who has her love and her life gleaming in front of her. Although not all the songs hold up, it is nice to have Harvey back on guitar and revealing herself a little more, after years of hiding behind personas, false eyelashes and lots of anger. If some songs have to suffer for this, then the compensation is worth it. Besides -- no one ever said the climb uphill was easy. (Jen Appel)

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Pitchfork Media: 5.5/10

My philosophy has always included the tried-and-true motto, "You have to take the good with the bad, and the bad with the good." More and more, though, I'm beginning to wonder if there aren't some holes in that philosophy. Good and bad are, by definition, polar opposites, but whoever first penned this motto forgot to mention the center of the spectrum: things that are neither good, nor bad, just... there. Do you have to take that as well?

After hours of internal deliberation, I've decided you don't. Bland, middling music can often be more offensive than something genuinely awful. If you're hearing something bad, at least emotions and feelings are evoked. Average music, though, just fades into the background. You feel nothing, so you virtually hear nothing; the frequencies are wasted on your ears. You could have used that time to hear something that at least causes some kind of reaction.

With each album, Polly Jean Harvey moves gradually from the barrage of passion of her previous work into the central category. 1993's Rid of Me captured her in her raw environment, setting fires and creating primal rhythms with just her electric guitar. On her fifth solo release, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, she may be maturing, or more vulnerable, or more vulnerable to her maturity. But regardless, the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller as the time passes.

As inspiration for this album, Harvey spent six months in New York, fully shedding her old wolf's skin for a more stylish, expensive wool-lined jacket. The record begins with "Big Exit," a track that shows Harvey posing as a bored Patti Smith. Granted, the chorus hook is one of her best in recent memory, but even that moment emits a vague feeling of by-product familiarity. "Good Fortune" sustains a similar but even more banal pop sound, with Harvey distinctly recalling Chrissie Hynde, both musically and vocally. And "A Place Like Home" and "We Float" further the tepid attitude, replacing the live drums of the first two tracks with cheap, glossy programmed beats that would feel right at home on a Des'ree record.

The lyrics on Stories from the City are just as average as the music-- so average, perhaps, as to seem much worse than they actually are. On "Big Exit," Harvey feels intimidated by this crazy world, singing, "I want a pistol in my hand/ I want to go to another land." On "This is Love," she barely elaborates on the already mundane title, adding this seemingly non-sequiturial commentary: "Does it have to be a life full of dread?/ Wanna chase you 'round the table, wanna touch your head." Most of the rest of her prose is similarly culled from an elementary rhyming dictionary.

Stories from the City does have a couple of songs interesting enough to almost save it from the desert of mediocrity. "One Line" provides a pleasant musical backdrop for once, with rhythmic muted guitar, a sustained vibraphone, and ethereal background vocals by Thom Yorke. Yorke then takes a gorgeous turn at lead vocals in "This Mess We're In," continuing with a similar cadence, with Harvey singing the chorus over Yorke's wordless crooning. And "Kamikaze" has enough actual aggression and feeling to make it the record's only real standout, featuring a live duplication of a frantic, jazzy jungle beat, rough guitars, and a vocal performance that comes her closest to resembling passion since To Bring You My Love.

But three good songs do not a record make. In the end, Stories from the City ends up just slightly to the right of the dead middle ground. A shame, too, since Harvey once used space and dynamic to make exciting music. Now, more often than not, she uses music to make empty space. Optimistic as I am, though, I'd like to look at it this way: as far between as the moments of enjoyment may be, they're still there, which proves Harvey still has a little bit of the knack left. She may now appreciate style over substance, but she surely still loves making music, even if her sense of conviction is less powerful than it used to be. (Spencer Owen)

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Q Magazine: 4/5 Stars

Polly Harvey is obviously quite a gal. On her much-anticipated duet with Thom Yorke, a brilliant ode to short-lived infatuation entitled This Mess We're In, she has cajoled a man long used to lyrics about car crashes and escalators into singing "Night and day, I dream of making love to you, baby." That there is nothing incongruous about the moment only heightens the achievement.

As it turns out, most of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is surrounded by a similar scent of triumph. The swampy exotica that was draped around both 1995's To Bring You My Love and '98's Is This Desire? has been forgotten: as proved by the likes of Big Exit and the pleasingly frantic Kamikaze, the dominant sound is that of a three-piece garage band, fused with enough production panache to prove that Harvey remains an admirably intelligent auteur.

Imagine a grown-up take on the classic 1992 single Sheela-Na-Gig - and bear in mind that Harvey now sounds very like Patti Smith - and you'll have some idea of how good this album is. One can only hope that, in a world apparently dividing its attention between Limp Bizkit and Christine Aguilera, Harvey's majesty doesn't fall on deaf ears. (John Harris)