Uh Huh Her Reviews



Rolling Stone: 3.5/5 Stars

"I can't believe that life's so complex/When I just want to sit here and watch you undress," Polly Jean Harvey sang a few years back on "This Is Love," the best song on the best album of her career, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. After spending most of the Nineties as a mysterious, cult-building heroine, she found something like happiness on Stories. Now, after four years and a queen-size dose of bad love (or so it seems, despite Harvey's claims that her songs aren't strictly autobiographical), we find the English farm girl in blues-poet mode once again. On Uh Huh Her, she evokes disturbed, historically significant females such as Clytemnestra, Emily Dickinson and Polly Jean Harvey.

Harvey doesn't brandish many new moves here. Raw, riff-heavy numbers such as "Who the Fuck?" and "The Letter" revisit her more punkish early days, and "It's You" and the delicately atmospheric "You Come Through" recall the slow-burning metaphysical turn she took with 1995's To Bring You My Love. But having reaffirmed her DIY instincts (Harvey produced the album and played everything except drums), she packed Uh Huh Her with moments of austere beauty, straight-ahead melancholia and more tenderness than ever. She compares a lover's words to poison ("The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth"), imagines good times ("You Come Through") and brandishes a knife to thwart off marriage (the magnificently creepy "The Pocket Knife"). On the murky, resigned closer "The Darker Days of Me and Him," Harvey dreams of a land with "no neurosis/No psychosis/No psychoanalysis/And no sadness." But darkness is still Harvey's métier, and she can dive into personal dramas that would make lesser talents sound silly. (Christian Hoard)

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Spin: B+

Polly Jean Harvey’s records have always been good for putting your relationship problems in perspective. Like that movie where a jilted Glenn Close boils Micheal Douglas’ bunny, they present human sexuality as an emotional horror show, filled with unpretty hungers, inevitable betrayals, and howling comeuppances. For Harvey, declarations of love flash like switchblades. By turning feminine needs into a balls-out assertion of power, records like 1993’s Rid Of Me started a new thread on rock’s aesthetic message board. Smart emo boys took notes; girls like Karen O plotted new career opportunities.

Harvey’s last album, 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, was something new: a record that suggested love might actually deliver on its promises. By her avant-punk-blues standards, it was polished and tuneful. Her album-cover persona was different, too. There was no suggestion of satanic possession or suicide by drowning; she even had a nice haircut. It was jarring at first, yet it stands with Harvey’s best records. Happiness, it turned out, suited her just fine.

But apparently it didn’t last. On Uh Huh Her, Harvey’s back to the morning-after realm of toxic relationships and avenging lovers. The song titles are a tip-off: “The Darker Days of Me & Him,” “The Desperate Kingdom of Love,” “Shame,” “The End.” The sound is too: where Stories was a big studio affair featuring pals like Thom Yorke, Her was recorded mostly solo at her home studio on old analog gear. Aside from drum tracks laid down after the fact by longtime collaborator Rob Ellis, she plays everything herself, mixing autoharp, melodica, accordion, and violin with her usually gnashing guitar. It’s a lonely vibe, and it suits the songs.

“The Slow Drug” combines synth stabs with pizzicato strings, tape hiss, and a vocal that sounds like it was whispered into an answering machine at 4 A.M. “The Pocket Knife” suggests a girl talking her way out of an arranged marriage; set to the pulse of Arabic percussion, it could be a North African folk song ghostwritten by Jane Bowles. Things get noisy, too, notably on “Who the Fuck?,” a classic Harvey freak-out with twisted guitars and vocals that nod to Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

The rubbed rawness of Uh Huh Her might seem like backpedaling. But the best tracks use the pleasure principles of Stories to update her old approach. “The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth” and “Shame” have a melodic generosity that’s a foil for darker lyrics, and this makes for a new kind of tension between the nightmare of short-circuiting love and its unhealthy allure. Even the lesser songs boast her uncanny ability to conjure romantic dread. “The Letter,” a claustrophobically horny creative-writing exercise, feels tossed-off, almost laughable-until you realize that the narrator’s inability to transcend high school-diary metaphors is meant to illustrate just how desperate she is. In this world, epistolary relationship can leave you as bruised as a physical one.

Some artists swap themes like costumes. Others are called by a particular subject, and find infinity in it. Polly Harvey is the latter, a blues singer endlessly rooting through love’s dark cellar, and Uh Huh Her is her latest set of basement tapes, as familiar as an old scar and as freshly stinging as a new wound. And like the best blues singers, she makes sorrow fell anything but passive. On one of the record’s most indelible songs. A swirling Radiohead-like rocker called “Cat on the Wall,” she tries to drown out the sound of a lover’s voice in her head by listening to a song on the radio. But the song reminds her of her lover. So what does she do? She screams out for someone to turn up the volume. The sound probably won’t kill her pain. But you know it helps.

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Pitchfork Media: 7.6/10

Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer had worn itself out by the time it ended, only a year later, it's startling how quickly the premise-- that a young girl can fight and defend herself just as well as a man-- has vanished from the airwaves. Just the next year, two of the biggest television events were the biopics of Elizabeth Smart and Jessica Lynch, two young, helpless girls who exist only to be rescued. We got a flashback to what we were missing when the Buffy spin-off Angel ended its own run. In one scene, a red-faced demon stalks up to a skinny, defenseless-looking brunette and taunts, "Take your best shot, little girl"; the brunette, unimpressed, reels around and throws a fist right through the chauvinist demon's face, killing him instantly.

PJ Harvey's fans are waiting for her to do much the same thing. Every time a new album's announced, part of her audience hopes she'll step up again as the loudest, boldest female guitar hero. It's not that Harvey sounds tame these days: Her confidence on stage and her edgy glamour have kept pace with her voice, which she has developed into one of the most powerful and seductive in rock. But the blaring guitars of Dry and unusual meter of Rid of Me were a quicker fix, and without them, Harvey's studio work grew cloistered and difficult.

Since 1995's To Bring You My Love, each of her albums has turned off some chunk of her fanbase. The subtle character studies and trip-hop backdrops of Is This Desire? struck some as cold or dissonant, and her John Parish collaboration, Dance Hall at Louse Point, is (wrongly) dismissed as erratic and avant-weak, even as it showcases her most striking vocals-- at turns chilled and self-absorbed, shriekingly gruesome, or tortured by rapture. And Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea won Britain's Mercury Music Prize, but even some diehards called it slick and easy; and post 9/11, Stories actually sounds creepy, whether for the references to helicopters over New York, the song "Kamikaze", or that duet with Thom Yorke, which is hairlessly erotic like newts 69'ing.

Now, four years later, Uh Huh Her-- with its guttural title, punk-ugly cover and its advertised guitar-focus-- is billed as a "return to form." But even if guitars dominate Uh Huh Her, the album ignores all expectations. Harvey plays everything but drums, and you can recognize her rough and earthy tone on the electric, played like she's molding clay. But even the buzzing distortion is focused and spare, mounted the way a collector hangs a precious Japanese sword. It actually resembles Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, a guitar album that also succeeded because of its mood-- not because the mood saves the songs, but because the terse, simple writing makes the album so intimate.

The scenes of sexual tension and crisis here resemble those of Is This Desire?, but this time they don't require names or places. "The Pocket Knife" resembles a folk murder ballad, with a simple, perfect guitar part and lyrics like, "Please don't make my wedding dress/ I'm too young to marry yet/ Can you see my pocket knife?/ You can't make me be a wife." Harvey murmurs "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" over a gentle acoustic, and the delicate imagery enhances a straight-up love ballad; and if the final song, "The Darker Days of Me and Him", promises recovery after a bad break-up ("I'll pick up the pieces/ I'll carry on somehow") the tone stays grim, and Harvey's not patting herself on the back for knowing better.

Yet as careful as the atmosphere sounds, Harvey's ready to tear it apart at any time. "Cat on a Wall" actually sounds murky and misplaced, but "The Letter", the album's first single, builds in sharp bursts and terse riffs under the shrewd sexual imagery: "Take the cap/ Off your pen/ Wet the envelope/ Lick and lick it." And the two-minute tantrum of "Who the Fuck?" devolves into the caveman-talk promised by the album title-- for example, the bridge: "Who/ Who/ Who/ Who/ Fuck/ Fuck/ Fuck/ You." Britain's Guardian newspaper cites this as proof that Harvey's a "certified lunatic," probably because they don't get the concept of "catharsis."

By the time you hear the accordion-and-guitar interlude, or the full minute of seagull calls, it's clear that Harvey isn't making a "rock" record per se. And maybe to preserve the mood, Harvey doesn't give us her most striking material. Outside of a few tracks like "The Letter", "Pocket Knife" or "The Desperate Kingdom of Love", the album is stronger than the sum of its interludes. But if you take it as a whole, Uh Huh Her is deeply engrossing: Harvey has never explored the minimal-verging-on-primitive side of her music so thoroughly, or captured so exactly the sound of a mood swing.

And once again, unlike many of her peers and fellow 90s veterans, she refuses to categorize herself. Her recorded work shows her not as a diva singer, or a rock goddess-- no matter how much her fans, or the world, want that-- but as an artist, who will seize the world or retreat from it completely if it serves her ends. Harvey has never recorded a weak record, or even a transitional album; nothing set the audience up for this disc, and we may wait another four years until she's satisfied with the next one. And that one probably won't sound like Dry, either. (Chris Dahlen)

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New York Times:

When you say P J Harvey's new album is raw, what are you really saying?

Are you saying it sounds as if she wrote all the songs and played all the instruments, except the drums? (This much we know for sure.) Are you saying the music sounds ragged, as if it had been bashed out in an afternoon? Are you saying the album is somehow pure and unfiltered? Are you saying she's singing the truth?

Ms. Harvey has spent more than a decade brilliantly toying with inane assumptions like these. She understands the wild daydreams that a jagged guitar lick and an overaspirated syllable can inspire. She knows that a bent note in the right place conjures up expectations of bluesy authenticity, even in listeners who should know better. And she has figured out that in rock 'n' roll, plagiarism can be a form of honesty: songs often ring true because they remind us of other songs.

The album is called, "Uh Huh Her" (Island/Def Jam), and the first song, "The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth," begins with low, raspy guitar chords and a ridiculous pulp-fiction couplet. ''Baby, you got a bad, bad mouth/Everything is poison that's coming out,'' she moans, proving that sometimes the rawest lyrics are also the most overcooked.

That's precisely the idea, though: "Uh Huh Her" is full of songs that could be barbaric yawps or ironic poses, depending on how you hear them. On the third track, a short and sharp blast that might double as a salute to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (one of many bands in her debt), Ms. Harvey yelps a petulant phrase -- one not likely to appear in this newspaper -- until she has reduced it to a handful of nonsense syllables.

Her previous album was "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea," a vivid and relatively lush disc that included some of Ms. Harvey's best and biggest songs. By comparison, "Uh Huh Her" sounds skinny and anxious, all jagged guitars and cramped melodies. It is a beautiful, thorny album painted in broad, rough strokes: "The Letter" sets a seductive scene using only a grimy blues riff and some crude epistolary metaphors. ("Take the cap/Off your pen/Wet the envelope/Lick and lick it.")

Which brings us back to raw, back to that fraudulent (but seductive) idea that a wily rock veteran has simplified her music to show us her soul. In "The Desperate Kingdom of Love," her voice and her guitar are so quiet they are almost drowned out by tape hiss; it is not hard to imagine you're huddling in her bedroom, listening to shivery secrets.

She knows exactly what's she's doing and how she's doing it, and the album booklet makes sure we know she knows. It is full of snapshots of the singer, and the images are covered with handwritten notes about the music, some dreamy ("Scare myself"), some practical ("Needs to be bloody well in tune!"), many excruciatingly self-conscious ("Too normal? Too P J H?").

One scrap reprints lyrics from the album's final song, "The Darker Days of Me and Him": "No neurosis/No psychosis/No psychoanalysis/No sadness." Directly below the lyrics, a more down-to-earth addendum: "No use piano." And below that, a sly joke for anyone reading too deeply: "No cymbals."

The songs on the album sometimes feel a bit like these scraps in the booklet: riveting but somehow coy. It is a short disc (41 minutes), and not an entirely satisfying one: instead of stories and characters, we get a series of gestures, a few false starts, pockets full of poses. This is an album of shards, then. But they're sharp. (Kelefa Sanneh)