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.
