A woman lives in a garden surrounded by high rock walls. Moss and lichen grow like the hair and skin of something ancient over the cobblestone. Everything in the garden is old, and even new things are aged by the air inside of it. No one can come in, nor can she get out. She sees a figure passing outside between the cracks in the wall and wonders who they are, what life might be like if they were together in the garden. When the wind blows through the cracks in the wall, she mistakes it for the figure’s voice, crying out to her in a language beyond sense. She longs to know whomever it is, but she can never know them, she can only know what she imagines—her ideas and dreams of the person, which are just refractions of her, broken mirror pieces in which she’s just as likely to appear as disappear.
Every song on PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? is a story, and each of them operates in some way like this. They’re loops, cycles without end: If they dried up and died in the winter, they might blossom again in the spring, their longings renewed in the thaw. They progress from chorus to verse as if they were taking meaningless daily walks, always in the same direction, always accompanied by the same obsessive sequence of thoughts. The only change is in intensity, a desperation to remain or even just briefly appear in the sight of the one they’re longing for. Here I am. Can’t you see me? Don’t you know who I am?
The album wasn’t Harvey’s first attempt at wrestling with desire. Desire on her early records was often depicted as a power struggle between spirit and body, out of which she emerged feral, screaming, sometimes covered in the blood of someone else. This culminated in her persona on To Bring You My Love, a devil in a red dress and heels, a conductor of desire that made things happen through the sheer power of seduction. “I was quite lost as a person then, and I reflected that,” she told USA Today. “Rather than it being a mask, it was an experiment and a stage I needed to go through.” Is This Desire? marks the end of that experiment in persona, though ironically there’s more persona than ever: It’s the only one of her albums that’s entirely split up into character studies. And it’s strange and disarming to notice that no character in Is This Desire? has any kind of sexual or romantic power, not over their beloved nor over themselves. They are piloted entirely by their longings, onto the path toward their own doom.
“Angelene” opens the record, and it’s the most straightforward of the stories Harvey tells, a thesis statement of sorts that prepares you for ones that harbor more negative space. “My first name Angelene, prettiest mess you’ve ever seen,” Harvey sings simply, plainly, as if for the first time she didn’t feel the need to prove a point with her voice. (She took vocal lessons before recording Is This Desire?, which made her feel more comfortable singing in a relaxed register. “I think I can say for the first time in my life that I’m singing with a voice that is my own, which is Polly,” she told The Irish Times in 1998. “I’m not wearing a mask or playing a part.”) Guitar chords shift uncertainly like legs under a skirt, as if anxious for something else in the song to happen. Then drums appear like a wave beneath the changes, taking us from verse to chorus, into the protagonist’s dream of a man far away, whom she could love, who could rescue her from being an object of desire and turn her into a person who freely desires. But dreams offer only the briefest relief from the tedious rhythms of her life and from the men she invites to her room for sex, none of whom resemble the man she believes is out there, waiting for her.
“One of my dreams is to be a writer of some kind,” Harvey said at the time. “Not just a songwriter, but a short story writer.” So while writing Is This Desire?, she read midcentury American authors such as Raymond Carver, J.D. Salinger, and Flannery O’Connor, writers whose short stories often depicted people stuck inside of themselves or their surroundings, unable to progress beyond the fears or longings or preconceived notions they’ve been steeped in. Everyone in these stories is in some way doomed to be themselves. O’Connor in particular figures heavily into Harvey’s lyrics, with two songs on the record being variations of her stories. One of them, “Joy,” closely examines the daughter character in “Good Country People,” a 30-year-old unmarried woman with a prosthetic leg, unable to leave her family home because of her heart condition. She studies philosophy and believes she can see through to the absolute nothing lurking behind all things, but this proves to be just a front; when she encounters a Bible salesman in whom she briefly glimpses innocence, he, a true believer in nothing, cruelly takes it away from her. Like the other characters in Is This Desire?, Joy doesn’t believe in nothing, and in fact believes all too much in something which is unavailable in her life, a kind of hope or faith that could remove her from her station, that no one can or will give her, and that, even as she appears to grasp it, evades her reach.
What Harvey also takes from O’Connor is the mood and sense of place of the Southern gothic; even when the songs are delicate and withered as bare trees, the air around them is thick, and every action inscribes something in it not easily erased. Insects buzz, wind whispers, sirens whir; in the unreachable distance loom houses, which the characters may think of as sanctuaries from loneliness but could just as well be sites of cruelty and violence. This is where the sound design of the record completes the stories Harvey is writing, making the songs seem more like audio dramas or short films, the instruments taking roles like actors and sound effects. In “A Perfect Day Elise,” two people enter a hotel room for a tryst, and the drums are like knocks on the door during sex, reality breaking in on a scene that for at least one of the characters is significantly more spiritual than transactional. There’s also the synth figure in “Electric Light,” a psychosis-inducing melody that might play in the head of a murderer in a noir film. It makes the song’s longing eerie, as if it’s for someone dead, lying under the bright artificial lights of an examination table.
The last time I listened to this record, I wondered if “Electric Light” was actually the aftermath to “Elise”—if the man so fixated on the character of Elise killed her, turning her into a perfect object for his desire and worship, untroubled by anything so inconvenient and unpredictable as a personality. I don’t know that Harvey would support this interpretation. But great literature leaves enough room for the reader to walk into the work themselves and make their own connections. And Harvey’s stories do swim into each other across the album: In “The Wind,” a lonely woman named Catherine ascends to high places to listen to the wind and make whale noises into it. (Catherine is based off of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of women devoted to higher learning, so it’s implied her isolation is deliberately chosen, part of a greater communion with and devotion to knowledge and spirit.) But both Catherine and the wind appear again in the song “Catherine,” as the subjects of a former lover’s bitter jealousies: “I envy the road, the ground you tread under/I envy the wind, your hair riding over,” Harvey sings as if through cracked ribs, as if it were a sentiment almost too painful to pronounce.
Her voice and sound were in mutation; in some sense they had always been, but none of her albums sound quite as in flux as Is This Desire?, as if the tracks were figures forming out of murky shadow. She’d collaborated with Tricky earlier in the year, on the song “Broken Homes,” from which her voice issues like a ghost among a funeral procession of decayed horns. “[Tricky] has what I admire in other artists, which is that he doesn’t seem too scared to try out anything he wants to try,” Harvey said, “no matter how revolting it sounds or how uncommercial it sounds. It’s like he’s following his own path and for me as an artist that’s the most important thing to do, in fact it’s the only thing to do.” You can hear this influence creeping most into the sunken realms of songs like “My Beautiful Leah” or “Joy,” both about women who can’t lift themselves out of the mud ensnaring their ankles. It’s these elements that help the album feel like you’re hearing field recordings of feelings—aching, burning, teeth-grinding emotions that make you walk a little more unsteadily and resentfully through your life. And the source of these feelings is always the same: someone alone, lost, wanting for something they can’t have, on the verge of disappearing as they and their desires never arrive anywhere they want to go.
After getting acquainted with each of these hopeless character studies, the listener’s path ends in the title track, seemingly the only song on the album to focus on two people who’ve found each other, who are traveling together through a sparsely composed landscape made up of the sun rising and setting, coolness and fire. There’s no anxiety between the two characters, Joe and Dawn, as they travel; still, underneath the security of what they share lies a lingering question, which expands the question posed by the title of the album: “Is this desire?/Enough, enough to lift us higher?” A question ambiguous enough to haunt the space behind even the most deeply felt love and devotion: Now that it’s fulfilled, what will we do with it?
